Edith Zhang

Statement

A guiding principle in my artwork is "primality". To me, the adjective "primal" is related to but different from the adjectives "organic", "simple", "perfect", "primeval", "fundamental". I am enchanted by the sphere, limits, conservation, and singularity, and I attempt to incorporate these concepts into visual form. Many of the ideas I draw or paint are related to mathematics that I learn through courses, research or simply browsing wikipedia. Many of my artworks have a tenuous explicit connection to mathematics, but nevertheless satisfy the same aesthetic sense that drives my interest in mathematical topics. Please check out my website with more information about me, my art, and my math at https://edithjinzhang.github.io/.

Artworks

This artwork originated because I bought a compass, and decided to play around with it. The resulting image is reminiscent of two-dimensional Appolonian sphere-packing, of the appearance of oil bubbles on water, and contains some visual similarity to the Mandelbrot set. Vaguely-intestinal shapes stand out against the flat, clean cluster of disks in order to invoke some dimensionality and intrigue. Drawing the packed spheres was a fun challenge, as was shading around the locations where spheres kiss: I aimed to shade as darkly and as sharply as possible in those areas.

This drawing consists of many "lines" of dots. In contrast to another dots drawing, dots do not appear and disappear in the interior of the shape, but follow a stricter regimen where they follow each other in a somewhat-regular way, in a sort of distorted grid of dots. If continuously deformed, the drawing should straighten out into a regular grid of dots on the plane. Because of this conservation, tears and wrinkles form in the fabric of dots.