Susan Happersett

Statement

I have always been inspired by the grace and beauty of Mathematics and have been looking for ways to express that beauty through art. My work is widely collected by leading museums and universities around the world. In my art, I explore the aesthetic qualities of mathematics through sequences, series and, now, mapping. I express my ideas in drawings, paintings, artist's books, and videos. Recurring themes in my work are the Fibonacci Sequence, Chaos Theory, the Cartesian Coordinate System, the Cantor Set, Self Similarity and Fractals. Crucial to me is that all my work is hand-drawn: I design the algorithm and then I execute it by hand. I am the computer.

Artworks

The newest permutations of my mathematically generated lace drawings use a rhomboid lattice foundation. The shortest diagonal of each rhombus has the same length as each of the sides, creating obtuse 120-degree angle vertices and acute 60-degree angle vertices. These particular quadrilaterals are useful in drawing a 2-D rendering of a 3-D cube. The underlying structure for each drawing is formed by a rhombus pattern of points with 7 points forming each side. Using an algorithm to draw point-to-point mappings between prescribed points within each rhombus the lace patterns emerge.