"Although I am a painter, I also have a doctorate in mathematics and so the structure of my work is mathematical. When you get into higher math, it’s thrilling. It’s living in another world. The way that mathematics always uses the elegant solution, my work has an elegant solution aspect to it. But explain it, I can’t. That’s why I do it, because it’s not explainable in language." (Dorothea Rockburne)
Dorothea Rockburne studied Art at Black Mountain College and at the suggestion of the famous mathematician Max Dehn who was a teacher there, also Mathematics and the underlying geometries in nature and art. Many of her works like the Golden Section Paintings which are constructed from linen coated in gesso and varnish and were then cut and folded based on the mathematical ratio, refer to a construction method used by artists and
architects since antiquity to produce shapes of harmonious proportions. She thinks of paper as a metaphysical object and of active material determining the form of
the work. She used opaque carbon paper to create wall installations by folding,
pressing, and scoring such a sheet against the wall, allowing marks to appear – "to make themselves" – as pigment was transferred to other
surfaces. In 1973 she made "Neighborhood" (in Drawing Which Makes Itself at MoMA, 2013), an interactive version of the carbon paper installations which was
attained bei the Dia Foundation New York. "As visitors move through the
gallery at Dia:Beacon, they unconsciously engage with the installation by
creating micro drafts of air that dislodge particles in the wall
drawings. Over time, as these transfers take place, the room becomes a
visual log of the activity within it and the time that has passed." (from the announcement of Rockborne's expanded exhibition at Dia Beacon, 2019)
By chance in 1990 in a mannerist villa in Italy (probably built around 1650, shortly after Galileo Galilei died), she came to see one room there devoted to astronomy. On the ceiling was a painting of the various paths of the planets, of energy centers painted by someone informed by mathematics. When she came back to New York her work completely changed.
"I guess that's what Mandelbrot is saying too. He is saying it's all visual. And at that time when I was working all information was verbal until computers, information except for art itself was being disseminated in words. After computers, then it began to be visual and I am wondering what ... our generation will come up with because information is now visual." (Dorothea Rockburne on Benoit Mandelbrot at Bard Graduate Center, New York 2012)
Dorothea Rockburne on Drawing Which Makes Itself, MoMA, 2013 (3:56 Min.)
How the Universe is Wired: Dorothea Rockburne on Mandelbrot and the Working Process at Bard Graduate Center, 2012 (14:36 Min.)
Dorothea Rockburne interview by Lyn Kienholz and Rohini Talalla for Netropolitan: Museum without walls, 2003 (13:32 Min.)
