Statement

The astonishing views of the cosmos and the natural world opened up by modern science captivated the artist Myrrh. She made it her life work to bring them to a wider audience. “I am awestruck by the immensity and delicate details of the world that have been revealed in my own lifetime.”

She began by using patterns in nature and the look of exotic science imaging techniques. She was influenced by the geologic maps, drawings of rock formations and crystals of her geologist father.

Her physicist husband interested her in the mathematics underlying the material world. Thus, visual mathematics underlies much of her work.

Myrrh has used many media to play with patterns in nature: batik and shibori, paper marbling and printmaking. She invented topographic landscapes by painting crumpled paper. These she dubbed her “N.A.S.A. works: Not Actually Science Achievements.” She remains convinced that there is still a place for the hand-painted image to integrate the science images that now surround us.

While working with these images, she became fascinated at the layers of reality she was dealing with, from sub-atomic particles to galaxies. "Levels in Matter" became a major theme in her work.

Myrrh’s current works, “Essential Mysteries,” probes not what is obvious and useful in science, but what is at the edge of detection, and mysterious. “Essential Mysteries” are painted on Plexiglas with glowing acrylic paints, and have a stained-glass appearance.

In 1970, when she decided to make science images a major theme in her work, the technology of science imaging was really taking off. Lecturing about imaging techniques eventually linked her with computer graphics professionals at the cusp of the personal computer revolution. In 1981, feeling she had met her tribe, she started YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology. Its goal was to bring artists together with scientists and technologists. It met a felt need, for it expanded into an international organization and has endured. In 2003, she and her friend, Shoshanah Dubiner, started a special interest group within YLEM on visual math and patterns in nature.

Around these subjects she has not only created a body of art with numerous solo shows, but lectured, edited the YLEM Newsletter, written articles, curated shows, produced cable television programs, and had her work included in prestigious national exhibits.

She was born in Washington, DC in 1936, and spent her early years in the Southern Appalachians where her father was doing geology. At her Quaker high school in Pennsylvania, she was encouraged to do service work in the inner city of Philadelphia. There she had the benefit of knowing people who were quietly making a big difference in people’s lives and public policy.

“ I think this is why I have felt moved from time to time to drop out of art and participate in social movements, and why my concerns have spilled over into my art.”

She moved to California in 1954. 30 years later, Central American refugees were on her doorstep, telling her about distress in their countries. Her compassionate drawings and paintings about the civil war and later, massive earthquakes, in El Salvador became exhibits of her work that traveled for years to more than 30 locations on the West Coast. Profits from sales of this work have gone to Quaker projects in El Salvador.

“We have made an immense leap in understanding the natural world in the last century. At the same time, when I read texts thousands of years old such as the Bible or the I Ching I realize how little human nature in all its wisdom and stupidity has changed. Problems of rich and poor, of war and colonial exploitation, of how individuals dare to create justice within an unjust system were very much on the minds of the writers of the Bible. And Confucian ideals revolved around the harmonious and right ordering of social relationships.”