The Geometry of Hope series pays tribute to the group of postwar Latin-American abstract artists whose work was shown together under that title, and in particular to the interplay of object and shadow in the “Drawings without Paper” of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego. But where Gego used elaborate wire constructions to “draw” on the wall, here strands of glass rather than wire cast the intricate shadows.

My process in this series derives from traditional textile practice, and while the work refers to translucent Korean pojagi, I use a non-traditional industrial material -- woven stainless steel -- as the fabric. Delicate glass rods, acid-etched and hand-couched with coated silver or copper wire, reinterpret the pojagi’s stitched lines.

Shadow gives the single-layer pieces a dual identity: on the surface of the work, an investigation of color relationships, whether bold contrasts or tone-on-tone shadings that test the edge of visual perception; on the wall, the image reduced to pure line. Multiple sources of light produce a doubling or tripling of the surface image in black-and-white form. The layered pieces play on the mysterious nature of objects half-perceived through a scrim; the two-layered pieces deconstruct an image and challenge the eye to reassemble it; the three-layered pieces give the illusion of peering into the structure of a crystal or a highly magnified cell.

Although I establish geometric rules for each piece, within those rules each piece is an improvisation, starting with a single line of glass and building outward, never sketched in advance. The linear structures draw on the random geometry of the cracked-ice motif of traditional Chinese grillwork and the manmade geometry of cultivated fields.

The rules for the most recent series are derived from soap bubbles. (Because my work is almost 2-D, I rely on shadow and layering to convey the clusters’ mysterious depths.) Representing their complex structure has been a non-scientist’s attempt to deduce physical laws by observation alone, without resorting to formulae, consistent with Jean-Louis Nicolet’s theory that the mind truly absorbs mathematical principles when it starts not from logical rules but from an intuitive, direct apprehension of the world. The process of constructing the work, line by line, stands in for the human search – whether a child’s inquiry or the scientific inquiries of a less technological age -- for comprehensible pattern in the natural world.

The Woven Glass Sculptures are an experiment in weaving with non-traditional materials, and in the contrasting properties of color expressed metal and glass: reflective/matte, opaque/ translucent.