Gwen Fisher

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For over a decade, Dr. Gwen L. Fisher has used artwork as a means to present complex mathematical ideas in visual forms as both a mathematics professor and a professional artist. She is keenly interested in the intersection of mathematics and visual art. She has been a contributor and editor for several math and art publications. Her current favorite medium for artistic expression is woven beadwork.

Her beadwork is showcased at her website beAdInfinitum.com and her Etsy shop gwenbeads

Contact Gwen at gwen(at)beadinfinitum(dot)com

Third Generation Sierpinski Tetrahedron
Third Generation Sierpinski Tetrahedron


Contents

Bat Country Inspiration

Gwen’s most popular three-dimensional design is a second-generation Sierpinski Tetrahedron made of seed beads, bugle beads, and thread. Three views of this beaded sculpture were published on the cover of the Journal for Mathematics and the Arts to accompany an article on the symmetry of beaded beads written by Gwen and coauthor Blake Mellor.

Gwen’s goals in building Bat Country are to communicate a mathematical concept in an artistic medium so that it is accessable to a general audience. She hopes that people will engage in exploring a mathematical object in a concrete, physical way so that they can see that math is more than just symbol manipulation and arithmetic.

Image:SierpBead.jpg

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. With Bat Country, this potentiality is finally realized.

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.

Art Publications, Exhibits and Professional Activity

Art Publications

  • "Harvest Jewels Necklace" Firemountain Gems Advertisement, Beadwork Magazine back cover, Oct/Nov 09.
  • "Deco Lotus Earrings" Beadwork Magazine, Oct/Nov 09.
  • "Archemedes Star Bracelet" Beadwork Magazine, Aug/Sept 09.
  • "Amethyst Earrings" (Cutie Pie Earrings), Beadwork Magazine, Dec 08/Jan 09.
  • "Woven Beads", Mathematical Imagery, American Mathematical Society, April 2008 and 2009 AMS Calender.
  • "Inspiration from an Octahedron," Mungbeing Magazine, Issue #16, Fall 2007.
  • "Three-dimensional finite point groups and the symmetry of Beaded Beads" including cover, coauthored with Blake Mellor, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 1(2), June 2007. Preprint PDF
  • "Mathematics Goes High Fashion" Math Horizons, September 2007.
  • "Dahlia Flowers in Mathematics, Nature, Art and Design" Math Horizons 13(3), February 2006.
  • "A Method for Illustrating Border and Wallpaper Patterns" Proceedings of the 8th Annual Bridges (Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science) Conference, July 2005.
  • "The Quaternions Quilts" including cover, Focus: Newsletter of the MAA, January 2005. Cover Reprint PDF
  • "Inspired by Snowflakes: Constructing, Folding, and Cutting Regular Paper Polygons to Create Art with Dihedral Symmetry" coauthored with Nicole Silkton, Proceedings of the 7th Annual Bridges (Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science) Conference (July 2004)
  • "On the Topology of Celtic Knot Designs" coauthored with Blake Mellor, Proceedings of the 7th Annual Bridges (Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science) Conference (July 2004) Electronic Journal Quilt
  • "Serendipity" including cover art, Quiltmaker Magazine, May/June 2004.
  • "Quilt Designs Using Non-Edge-to-Edge Tilings by Squares" Proceedings of the Joint Meetings of ISAMA 2003 and the 6th Annual Bridges Conference (July 2003) Quilt


Articles about Me and My Work


Joint publications with Florence Turnour

  • "Double Daisy Chain" Beading Pattern-a-Day: 2008 Day-to-Day Calendar, Accord, a division of Andrews McMeel Publishing
  • "Spinning Top Beaded Bead" Beading Pattern-a-Day: 2007 Day-to-Day Calendar, Accord, a division of Andrews McMeel Publishing November 2006
  • "Crystal Suspense" Beadwork 9(6), Interweave Press October-November 2006
  • "Color Coded Beads" Bead & Button, Kalmbach Publishing, April 2006
  • "Barrel Bead" Step by Step Beads, Primedia Publishing, May-June 2006
  • "Spinning Top Earrings" Step by Step Beads, Primedia Publishing, September-October 2005


Invited Talks, Workshops, and Exhibits

  • Laramie County Community College Art Gallery, Cheyenne, WY "A Mathematician Weaves Beads" February 1-23, 2010. Reception Announcement
  • Articulation Conference 2010, Laramie County Community College, Cheyenne, WY, Keynote Speech "How I Use Symmetry in My Art" February 19, 2010. Flyer
  • University of California, Santa Barbara, Mathematics Department Colloquium "3D Finite Point Groups and the Symmetry of Beaded Beads" April 2007.
  • Banff International Research Station, “Innovations in Mathematics Education via the Arts” January 21-26, 2007.
  • California Art Education Association Annual Meeting, Fresno CA, “Paper Snowflakes in Nature, Art and Mathematics” October 2006.
  • Cal State University Long Beach, Mathematics Department Colloquium, “Visualizing Symmetry: The Art of Symmetry Groups” September 2006.
  • Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, “The Quaternions Quilt,” “D Intersect H Quilt,” and the two-sided “Celtic Knot and Squared Square Quilt,” March 2006 to present.
  • Mathematical Association of America Regional Conference, University of Southern California, “The Quaternions Quilt” and “D Intersect H Quilt,” Spring 2005.
  • California Mathematics and Science Teacher Symposium, UCSB "Workshop: Dahlias Flowers in Art, Nature, and Mathematics" November 2004.
  • 3rd Annual Cal Poly Arts Education Conference, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo "Math & Art: Cross Disciplinary Connections" October 2003.


Exhibitions and Shows

  • August 30-September 6, 2009, "Bat Country" Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada
  • August 25-31, 2008, "Bat Country" Burning Man, Black Rock City, Nevada
  • March 2007, Beaded jewelry show, Art after Dark, Naturally Jennifer's Gallery and Beads, San Luis Obispo, CA
  • January 2006, “Symmetric Beaded Beads” American Mathematics Society's Mathematical Art Exhibit, Annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Antonio, TX
  • January 2005, "Symmetry I" American Mathematics Society's Mathematical Art Exhibit, Annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, Atlanta, GA


Review and Editing

Retail Locations

Finished Jewelry


Beadweaving Patterns & Kits

Education

Associate Professor of Mathematics at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (2001-2007)

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

All images, designs, and text on this site © 2005-2008 Gwen Fisher and/or Paul Brown. Permission required for any capture or reuse.

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