About the work:
For over twenty years I’ve been making work that relates
to one subject—the origins of life and especially of our lives as human
beings. My recent paintings depict turbulent gardens informed by nature’s
riotous beauty, or the deep space of our universe filled with a Byzantine
intricacy of stars, snowflakes, and snowmen.
Looking closely at these two
worlds—a garden and the universe—I can see that my work conveys the
order beneath the confusion found in both.
The science of fractals and
patterns of chaos are critically important to my exploration of these two
worlds, each of which seems at first to be a tangle of order/disorder or
violence/beauty. A fractal is a complex geometric figure made up of patterns
that repeat itself—each time on a smaller scale, and each smaller version
is referred to as a “self-similar ” form. I am drawn to nature’s intrinsic
capacity to create and reproduce pattern—as both a source of imagery and
working process for my own art.
Fractals basically tell the
story of the wild transformations in nature that take place on a daily basis,
and they give order to a chaotic world of energy and change. The paintings are
a response to these natural wonderments.
My daily, up-close encounter
with nature is the fifty-foot journey through our family garden, from home to
the studio. I’m continually “captured” by nature’s sheer lunatic
exuberance—a spectacle of complexity—beautiful, simple, and
seemingly haphazard.
Carrie Lederer
2007
