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Arts & Humanities: Visual Arts
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The Sculpture of Mary Bates Neubauer
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Mary Bates Neubauer (guild.com)
Publication Date: Spring 2005
Mary Bates Neubauer’s new sculptures are developed from sensuous organic forms that belie their true nature. They emerge from statistical evidence, much of it related to forces in our universe.
Mary Bates Neubauer sat at a computer, her hand tracing an image on a screen. She moved a pen over transparent paper in a dance that she repeated like a familiar refrain.
It was the mid 1990s. Neubauer had discovered a computer program that helped her to scale up small sculptures. She spent hours in front of a computer screen, tracing the slices that enabled her to enlarge her works.
“My hand shook a little bit and I thought, that’s information about my nervous system that is going into the shape of these pieces,” Neubauer recalls.
James Stewart was her assistant at the time. Together, they decided to leave the rastered marks in the work because it was information about the construction and evolution of the piece. But unlike Auguste Rodin, who was perhaps the first sculptor to leave the marks of his fingers and hands in his work, this was a digital mark.
“It was evidence of a hand-digital interface that showed the process in the enlarging of these sculptures,” Neubauer says. And through that process, she began to speculate on how she would add information to the surface of a form.
Neubauer is a sculptor and professor in the School of Art in the Herberger College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University. She works with organic, natural forms that she casts in bronze. The forms tower over her medium frame, but yield in her strong and confident hands.
Her most recent work developed from the organic, but the sensuous forms belie their true nature. They emerged from statistical evidence, much of it related to forces in our universe.
The creative process for this particular work began with a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Cambridge, England. The ASU scholar spent the better part of a year exploring the treasures of the great museums.
“I would go every week to one of the museums—The University Museum of Zoology or the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology or the History of Science Museum in Oxford, and of course, the British Museum in London,” she says with a trace of nostalgia. “The depth of their collections is much greater than most of our collections here. And they’re the old kind of collections, with glass cases and drawers you can pull out—dense collections of incredible materials.”
Neubauer filled sketchbooks with drawings of the materials she found in those drawers and glass cases. Back in her studio she created small-scale waxes of the forms. Her entire Fulbright year of study was the basis for the forms that became this work.
Returning to Arizona, she spent months scaling up the small waxes. At the same time, she was reunited with a childhood friend.
“It’s always interesting to me how the influence of somebody you’re close to brings whole new ideas into your life,” she says. Ken Neubauer, a statistician, e-mailed her box plots. Mary, already thinking more numerically about sculpture, transformed them using Photoshop software and sent them back as colorful gifts to her husband-to-be.
The process of what she envisioned began to take shape in her mind. Neubauer then spoke with ASU’s Anshuman Razdan, director of the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM), and Scott Van Note, who also worked with PRISM. Both agreed that using streams of numerical data that she transformed into three-dimensional, textural data was a worthwhile endeavor. They encouraged her to pursue the work. Neubauer was funded for a year with a grant from ASU’s Institute for Studies in the Arts. She used some of the money to hire Van Note.
“I chose to work with Scott because he works between sculpture and the digital domain. I needed someone who understood the need to actually make things,” she explains. “He was clear that the goal of the project was sculpture.”
Van Note is the kind of man who exudes enthusiasm for the beastliest challenge. He really had no idea where to begin. He is not, he says, a programmer.
“I wanted to take the Bezier curve that Mary has used in her work for an incredibly long time and have the information wrap around it,” Van Note says. “But I didn’t know the math for making the Bezier curve. And I wasn’t sure how I would turn it in space.”
There were starts and fits in his progression. But Van Note’s mind works like that of a programmer and he held steady in calculating the steps along the way. Eventually, he discovered a way to flatten out the space.
“Every calculation in that thing is two-dimensional. But it makes a three-dimensional shape. The key is translating it,” Van Note says.
With that realization Van Note jumped to the end.
“It hit me and I sat down for about five hours and just finished it. I got the computer code to work. I got the information on it. I got the Bezier curve on it.”
He e-mailed the files to Neubauer and wrote, “It’s ugly, but it works.”
While Van Note was struggling with the computer code, Neubauer was data-mining the Internet. Her first inclination was to use data from the Phoenix metropolitan area to inform the surface. She found it was too recent and not dense enough to create patterns.
Her husband assisted with mining data. They came across a site belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The site had a plethora of data related to the sun.
“Ken and I found these big, long cosmological cycles. Scott worked with two of those to start,” Neubauer recalls. “It didn’t really matter what the numbers were, he was just trying to write the programs. He worked information about sunspots and the factors of solar wind. The sunspot data was based on a reading made daily for 350 years. He did a lot with that because it included 11-year cycles and was fairly clear.”
In the early stages of the work, two-dimensional renderings of the data from the sunspots formed simple doughnut shapes and spirals. But as the work progressed, the regular patterns of the 11-year cycles became evident in the peaks and valleys of the three-dimensional forms.
Neubauer and Van Note were enthusiastic. They enlisted more programming assistance. ASU’s Software Factory is managed by Stephen Gordon. The factory supports the idea that software development is crucial to research.
Senior programmers manage and mentor students at the factory. Both students and researches reap the benefits. Gordon acknowledges the benefit to the students, but gives credit to Neubauer, the first artist to work with the Software Factory.
“There is one thing that I find most interesting about Mary’s data stream work,” Gordon says. “Even as the software becomes easier to use, does more of the work, and gains greater capability, it is still Mary’s artistic sensitivity that creates the final result, not the software. We are thrilled with her success.”
Neubauer is grateful for the extraordinary collaborative team she was able to bring together at ASU.
“I think there is this stereotype of an artist struggling alone in her studio. That may be true in some cases. But sculptors oftentimes need help,” she says. “I was never averse to the idea of collaborating. I didn’t realize until I got going on this project that the world has become so sophisticated. It takes several lifetimes of knowledge to do a project like this.”
From Van Note’s first “ugly, but working” model, Neubauer saw the potential beauty in the spiky shape. As other forms began to emerge, they took on the romantic sensuality of flowers and sea shells and imitated other forms from the natural world.
The two dimensional files themselves were striking when color was applied to their surfaces. In all, Neubauer and Van Note produced 16 sculptures and 11 two-dimensional prints for a 2004 exhibition at ASU. Prominently displayed along side the works of art were the numbers, the statistical data that produced the forms through Van Note’s mathematical algorithms and Neubauer’s vision.
Neubauer began the journey with a crude interface between her hand and a computer. The discoveries she made give her another way to create portraits of people or nature or a city that are not based in traditional methods.
“I think it’s really a unique way of arriving at sculptural form. It’s not derived from modernism. It’s not derived from the figure,” she says. “These forms are completely new in the world. They are about the world. But it’s not a narrative depiction of the world. It’s a depiction from another source—a mathematical source.”—Sheilah Britton