artist statement

The motivation behind my work is best explained by an excerpt from the preface of Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis:

"Imagine a society in which citizens are encouraged, indeed compelled up to a certain age, to read (and sometimes write) musical scores. All quite admirable. However, this society also has a very curious - few remember how it all started - and disturbing law: Music must never be listened to or performed!

Though its importance is universally acknowledged, for some reason music is not widely appreciated in this society. To be sure, professors still excitedly pore over the great works of Bach, Wagner, and the rest, and they do their utmost to communicate to their students the beautiful meaning of what they find there, but they still become tongue-tied when brashly asked the question, "What's the point of all this?!"

In this parable, it was patently unfair and irrational to have a law forbidding would-be music students from experience and understanding the subject directly through "sonic intuition." But in our society of mathematics we have such a law. It is not a written law, and those who flout it may yet prosper, but it says, Mathematics must not be visualized!

More likely than not, when one opens a random modern mathematics text on a random subject, one is confronted by abstract symbolic reasoning that is divorced from one's sensory experience of the world, despite the fact that the very phenomena one is studying were often discovered by appealing to geometric (and perhaps physical) intuition.

This reflects the fact that steadily over the last hundred years the honour of visual reasoning in mathematics has been besmirched. Although the great mathematicians have always been oblivious to such fashions, it is only recently that the "mathematician in the street" has picked up the gauntlet on behalf of geometry."

I studied math and physics with the ultimate intentions of picking up the gauntlet on behalf of analysis and mathematical physics, as I feel I must if no one else will given my unique skill set. But I feel that 2D visualizations, be they on the page of a book or on a computer screen, animated or static, are often insufficient to fully convey all of the sensory information to be had about these topics, as the experience of holding an object in one's hand is far more meaningful than merely seeing a photograph of it. I feel that this material is best illustrated through sculpture, and the more interactive, the better.

artist

Caroline Bowen is a 33 year old artist and amateur conservationist living in Louisville, Tennessee, in the Appalachian foothills of the Smoky Mountains. After spending her first three years as an art major, she became interested in meteorology after a close encounter with the April 27, 2011, Superstorm, and while enrolled in college algebra that fall, declared a physics major in order to pursue a master’s in meteorology despite never having taken a physics class before. The process of deriving concepts through drawing was central to her learning process right out of the gate, and in spring 2013, she used an open-ended assignment in a math+art graphic design class as an opportunity to gain some intuition into topics from her Calculus III class through sculpture. She has been designing math and physics visual aids ever since, with an ever-increasing arsenal of media and techniques. After graduating University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in December 2016 with a double major in math and academic physics with a minor in studio art, she is now able to devote herself more fully to studying and bringing her designs to life and has become a regular attendee of the international Bridges Math Art conference. Outside of being a Calculus Sculptress and her part-time job reloading test fire ammo at the family gunsmith shop, she’s usually busy out on the family acreage embodying her alter-ego, Feral Dirt Princess: big sunhat, Timberland boots, covered in sweat and sunscreen, waging war on the invasive plants with a big pair of loppers, feeling anxious about the health of the local Eastern Box Turtle population, abusing plant identification apps, and being obnoxious about birds.

Shows

Bridges 2016, Jyväskylä, Finland
PhysCon 2016 Art Contest, Best in Show and People’s Choice awards
Bridges 2017, Waterloo, Ontario
Bridges 2018, Stockholm, Sweden
The Art of Planetary Science exhibit at the American Astronomy Association, Division of Planetary Sciences 2018 annual meeting, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Bridges 2019, Linz, Austria
Bridges 2022, Aalto, Finland