Weaving in pi: 17 digits (57. . . 50) Artwork

Employing sequences from numbers pi or e, I create wall-based, occasionally ceiling-hung, geometric abstractions, where values of digits direct a composition’s formal structure: placement of line and shape, color relationships, and/or number of elements within a pattern. My current mixed-media, fiber-based works drift through multiple artforms in varying degrees. They may allude to painting, drawing, or tapestry. They combine languages of sculpture, embroidery, and weaving. The chaos of 2020 forced a shift in my studio practice. In reaction to Covid lockdowns concurrent with widening divisions within our society, I began combining acrylic sheet scraps left over from previous projects with found paper gift bags, later with industrial felts, and incorporating embroidery stitches, using a variety of yarns and threads. I explore simple and direct ways of combining synthetic industrial felts with acrylic sheet scraps, to create cohesive, uniquely interconnected communities, as slow stitching, a traditional craft element found across cultures and time, binds the two together. In combining dissimilar materials and multiple material and technique languages, this work challenges our perception of differences. It asks viewers to consider whether we see diversity as a hard difference that leads to the notion of otherness, or as variation within a unified group, others as part of us. A resident of Chicago since 1991, I was born in Soviet occupied Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1958, and immigrated with family to Dallas, Texas in 1969. My 1990 BFA from Southern Methodist University focused on sculpture and photography and includes a fellowship to Yale School of Art Summer Program in Norfolk, Connecticut which was anchored in painting. Since receiving an MFA in Sculpture from University of Chicago in 1994, I have exhibited extensively at regional museums, art centers, and university galleries throughout the United States. Exhibitions abroad include U.S. Embassies in Moscow, Ankara, and Abuja; the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; alternative galleries in London, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Jena - Germany, and Veliko Tarnovo - Bulgaria; art fairs in Berlin, Luxembourg, Milan, and Innsbruck; also Bridges Mathematical Art Exhibitions in Linz and Stockholm. I have created site-specific commissions for Facebook Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rosewood Hotel Abu Dhabi, and PricewaterhouseCoopers in NYC among other clients.