An Artist Explores the Concept of Levels in Matter

A R T I S T ' S N O T E An Artist Explores the Concept of Levels in Matter GertrudeMywh Reagan THE USE OF A HEXAGONAL MOTIF The hexagon is one of the basic patterns in nature on flat surfaces.Put three hexagonstogether, and their 120"angles add up to 360":they tile a plane. That hexagonsare used so little in art and architecture is not surprising, for joining three 120' angles requires greater accuracy in drawing and carpentering than joining four 90"angles [13.This underused motif had great appeal to me because I enjoydiagonal lines [2]. I had the desire to work on a large scale, but I had little storage space. Using hexagons, I could work in modules. The size of the hexagon I chose was 18 in across in the longest direction. If hexagons were rendered on cloth, I reasoned, they would be as trouble-free as quilts to store or transport.Batikwasthe mediumI used in the firsttwo works, PotPourn' (Fig. 1) and Animal, Vegetable,Mineral (Fig. 2). I devised severalways to control the hot wax resist to do fine, controlled work. Fiber-reactive dyes on cotton were my materials, delicate Indonesian wax pens were my tools. On the third work, Conjecture(Fig.3),where the hexagons were slightly larger, I devised a way to do the drawing in oil-baseprinter's ink.Just aspaper canbe laidon auniformly inked surface and the drawing can be done with a stylus on the top (back)sideof the paper, I discoveredthat stretched cloth can be similarlyused. Next,I batiked the background. Fig. 1. Potpourri,quiltedbatik,72-in triangle, 1973. PotPourn' was quilted in the traditional way. In the other two hangings, each hexagon had a backing and was stuffed with two layers of polyester felt to give it the substance needed for a wall hanging. My specialty as an artist is representational drawing, but photography has taken over many of the functions of this kind of art. The strategy of many artists has been to invent abstractions. Mine has been to find abstractions in nature to represent, and to place them in new contexts. In so doing, I have learned to observe nature and human artifacts in a fundamental way, looking for patterns and pondering the reasons for them. A B S T R A C T The idea that particlesmake atoms, atoms makemolecules, and moleculesmake visible matter -matter that lives and thinksis basic to a scientific understandingof the universe.While working with hexagons and ponderingthis hierarchy, the author discovered two surprising circular arrangementsof these levels that may shed lighton how we think when usingthese concepts. Sensitized, I began encountering six-sidedness everywhere . Many shapes were perfectly regular hexagons, but some of the interesting ones were not. I decided to include these in my collection of patterns. As the collection increased in number, my task became that of selectingfrom a wealth of motifs. Whereas in the first hanging, Potpourri, I used everything from a tortoise shell to a manhole cover design, the second large batik, Animal, Vegetable, Miwal, contained only natural objects. Another work, Benzene, rendered in embroidery and patchwork, contains seven conceptualizations of the benzene ring, including the 1865 original. When a phenomenon has many properties, it is difficult to find one diagram orformulation tocoverthem all.The subjectof thishanging was the use of multiple working hypotheses to aid understanding , a subject that has become a major theme in my subsequent work. The subject of Conjecture is the diagrams that scientists have made to explain their theories about the physical world. Thiswork continues to evolve; the present version is shown in Fig. 3. For ConjectureI decided that it would be especiallyinteresting to find designsthat represent differentlevels,or scale lengths, of the structure of matter. I freely admit that there is no necessaryrelation between these levels and hexagons; GertrudeMymh Reagan (artist), 967 Moreno Ave..PaloAlto, CA 94303, USA. Received 11 December 1987. 01990EAST PergarnonPressplc. PrintedinGreatBritain. 0024-!394)(/90 $3.00+0.00 LEONARDO,Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 3540,1990 35 but, once having decided on a theme for my new hanging, I stumbled onto designs that more or less fit both of these criteria. The method was not...