Join us for a special wine and cheese social event with a presentation from Dorothea Rockburne "My work as an artist with Sacred Geometry"
With this lecture I hope to share with you my lifelong investigation of mathematics, astronomy, Renaissance art, and Egypt as they relate to my art making process. I worked with the golden mean and geometric topology for a long time until I realized that in my visual thinking Euclidean geometry had transformed itself into a non-Euclidean geometry, which by its very nature is astronomy. Of course my three-and-a-half-week-long trip to Egypt in 1980-81 influenced me both in relation to the Golden Mean and to astronomy since in the tombs there are sky paintings.
One of the primary reasons I'm interested in astronomy is that we are composed of old stardust from the time of the Big Bang. Our bodies are proportioned according to the Golden Mean.
I approach painting in a way which takes as a given certain conventions while questioning others. Consider the convention of the rectangle itself. When I focus my seeing, my peripheral vision does not frame itself into a rectangle. It therefore becomes necessary to consider the rectangle as perhaps generating itself through itself. With this in mind I chose the Golden Section and the square of that as the beginning format.
The choice of the Golden Section and Sacred Geometry as a touchstone for my artwork is ultimately based on the notion of substructure. As one's thought and experience are formed and used a delicate moment occurs when the discovered becomes understood, known, and consequently incorporated. This then is substructure, those many irretrievable operations behind the frontally evident. To study the Golden Mean is to study the very nature of our universe.