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 and sculpture 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.
The work conveys the order beneath the confusion found in these two worlds—the garden and universe—both of which are astounding, capricious and anarchic.
The science of fractals and patterns of chaos are particularly important to my work. 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.
At first glance they seem to be a tangle of order/disorder or violence/beauty. I’m 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. My paintings, sculpture and installations 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 am continually captured by nature’s sheer lunatic exuberance—a spectacle of complexity -beautiful, simple, and seemingly haphazard.
—Carrie Lederer, 2009
