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Artists' statements
Gwen
Florence

Art Publications
Joint
Gwen

Exhibitions and Shows
Gwen
Florence

Education
Gwen
Florence

Introduction

We have both been artistically creative our whole lives, attending countless art courses and avidly reading fine art and craft books. Currently, we are enamored with beaded beads. We use original techniques that are decidedly different than the popular peyote stitch method of making beaded beads, giving our beads a fresh and different look. Like those who use peyote stitch, our main tools are a needle and thread; we do not use any glue or other adhesives.

In our professional lives, we teach and study mathematics. Our training in mathematics has helped us to more easily discover connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and forms, simplify a complicated pattern into its elementary parts, and combine those parts into new, complex forms. Through our work as educators, we have learned how to find the essence of a complex idea and help our students understand it. Likewise, when we develop the pattern for a new design, we concentrate on finding the easiest way to execute the design as well as the best way to communicate it to others. As artists, we take advantage of our education and background; we experiment with color, texture, form, symmetry (or lack thereof), and technique in a systematic way, searching for designs that are simple, elegant and unique.

Artist's Statements

Gwen Fisher's Artist Statement
I weave beads to appeal to people's affinity for organization in design. I use mathematics, including geometry, symmetry, and topology, as an inspiration for the structure of my creations. Across cultures and continents, humans show a natural affinity towards the aesthetic of pattern and order, and my art appeals to this aesthetic in a tactile, tangible form. I have found that people often recognize the repetition and order in my pieces, and so my art appeals to their sense of discovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar.

A remarkable feature of bead weaving is its scalability, and my incarnations are worked at the small end of that scale. I use beads as little as 1.5 mm by 1 mm to build clusters of beads, tiny enough to be worn as jewelry, or just to be carried in a pocket, like a good luck charm. While most of the individual beaded beads that I make are under 5 cm long, their designs have the potentiality to be scaled up to the size of large sculptures, so within their miniature frameworks is the potentiality of skyscrapers, or so I like to imagine.

I design patterns, or instructions, so that other people may enjoy reproducing my bead weaving designs. These patterns are intended to be beautiful objects in their own right. The drawn lines that represent the thread, the placement of the beads in the drawings, the colors, the photographs and layout, these are all important components of a beautiful pattern. Moreover, a pattern should be readable. I want the viewer to gain as much enjoyment from just reading the pattern as from executing it with real beads. The culmination of my written patterns as an art form comes when a viewer, or more precisely, another bead weaver, creates a real beaded bead from the pattern. In this way, the viewer of my artwork is not merely passive, but becomes an active participant in its creation.

Florence Turnour's Artist's Statement
Coming soon...

Art Publications

Joint publications of Florence and Gwen Gwen Fisher's Publications

Exhibitions and Shows

Gwen Fisher's Exhibitions and Shows
August 3-4, 2007, "Various symmetric beaded beads" Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America-ARTS Exhibit of Mathematical Art, Mathfest of the MAA, San Jose, CA

March 2007, Beaded jewelry show, Art after Dark, Naturally Jennifer's Gallery and Beads, San Luis Obispo, CA

March 2006 to present, "The Quaternions Quilt," "D Intersect H Quilt," and the two-sided "Celtic Knot and Squared Square Quilt," Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA

January 2006, "Symmetric Beaded Beads" American Mathematics Society's Mathematical Art Exhibit, Annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Antonio, TX Image

January 2005, "Symmetry I" American Mathematics Society's Mathematical Art Exhibit, Annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, Atlanta, GA Image

Florence Turnour's Exhibitions and Shows
June 2007, "Twilight" beaded bead necklace, Bead Dreams 2007 (juried competition), The Bead & Button Show, Milwaukee, WI Gallery page

April 2000, "More Than He Can Chew" ceramic birdhouse, Out on a Limb, A National Juried Exhibit, City Museum, St. Louis, MO

Education

Gwen Fisher's Education
Gwen is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison (August 2001)
Curriculum and Instruction, Mathematics Education (Minor: Mathematics)

M.A., University of California at Santa Barbara (December 1996)
Mathematics

B.A., University of California at Santa Barbara (March 1992)
Mathematics, High School Teaching Emphasis

Florence (Newberger) Turnour's Education
Florence is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at California State University, Long Beach. Web page

Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park (August 1998)
Mathematics

B.A., University of California at Santa Cruz (June 1992)
Mathematics

B.S., University of California at Santa Cruz (June 1992)
Geophysics
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All images, designs, and text on this site © 2005-2008 Florence Turnour and Gwen Fisher. Permission required for any capture or reuse.
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