Susie Mathre

When skiing in the winter, seed heads of plants, (especially weeds), are easy to spot as they rise above the snow. The dried heads of western salsify exemplify the dual Fibonacci spirals that are part of the phyllotaxis of most plants (the arrangement of leaves or petals on a stem in relation to one another). This piece shows 5 spirals going counterclockwise, and 8 clockwise. As a plant matures, the number of spirals in the Fibonacci pair gets larger; i.e. 8/13, 21/43, 55/89. This is called the parastichy /pəˈrastəkē/ number and is enjoyable to pronounce.

Because these seed heads are rather small, I enlarged and replicated them in steel, floating around their stems, each with their subtle differences. The domes have a functioning spring-loaded closure, modeled after my first nordic ski bindings. The encaustic wax base illustrates the dual spirals and the order that leaves and petals emerge from the stem, along with actual seeds embedded in the wax.

The peachleaf willow is a native species in Montana, common along riparian or wetland areas. The whiteness on the underside of the leaves (compared to the dark top side) initially caught my eye, but when that lightness failed to translate after being saturated in wax, I chose to highlight that aspect with a residual impression made by the leaf when pressed in wax before it has completely hardened. A small amount of cattle marker, (a bovine oil paint stick) rubbed over the impression and then wiped off revealed the fine detail remaining. Found steel that likely surrounded a t.v. screen from the 60s was used to create the wax filled ovals.

Horsetail, or puzzle grass, has been a plant that fascinated me from childhood; pulling the sections apart being the obvious action to take. I was delighted to discover there is a mathematical connection to the pattern of decreasing space between sections. John Napier, a 17th century Scottish mathematician was evidently inspired to invent logarithms after observing this ancient plant. To emphasize this progression, I threaded the grass through pieces of wood furniture; blocks used in letterpress printing that are another example of a mathematical progression. Embedded in the encaustic wax is an enlarged image of my father’s slide rule, a tool developed in the 17th century based on John Napier’s work that can calculate logarithms, if one knows how…

Musk thistle is considered an exotic thistle, (as opposed to native thistle, of which there are ten species in Montana), and commonly found in disturbed areas or grasslands. In bloom, they stand out with their magnificent magenta flowers, but once dried their spiny bracts stand out as something to give a wide berth. In late fall I was drawn to their beautiful gold centers; a softness surrounded by sharpness. This is the first piece I completed in this body of work, endeavoring to encase the spines while also letting some of them escape through holes. I also wanted to play with embedding the seeds and used cattle marker in the wax via a dress pattern tracing wheel.

In college, I took an art history class that at some point surveyed the architect Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect who is known for his use of the golden ratio as a system of proportion. I remembered this when I started collecting snail shells, as they exhibit the shape of a golden spiral, (and a Fibonacci spiral, which is an approximation of the golden spiral). Wanting to revisit this concept, I constructed a golden rectangle and filled them with a selection of shells, each compartment having a different variable as its focus.