Romanesco Fractals

In class we discussed Jeanne Robert Foster’s position upon returning to the Adirondacks: an outsider in a place of outsiders, entering a familiar but distant world on the periphery. Foster observed and wrote about the ordinary community life of those in Adirondacks through a lens filtered by her city perspective. This city versus rural and industrial versus natural dichotomy is one that greatly affects my own gaze as navigate through this place of the Adirondacks. While in most moments the tension between these two spaces feels stark and entirely oppositional, recently stumbling upon the sculptures of Patsy Cox has redefined the ways in which I’ve come to understand and experience the city and the Adirondacks.

In her exhibit Romanesco Fractals, Patsy Cox, taking inspiration from the logarithmic buds of the Romanesco Broccoli, uses the fractal spirals found in nature to create urban city-like clusters. Only when inspected closely can one see the intricate repetitive forms of Cox’s pieces; the viewer is perhaps, at times, overwhelmed by the busyness of repetition, something that Cox, in her description of the piece, describes as a celebration of the “structure, activity and growth found both in nature and the urban landscape… The conceptual combination of the manmade metropolis with the clumping, sprouting, flowering structures of natural plant life provides a point of intersection.” Her use of saturated and vibrant primary colors alongside stark whites seems dichotomous to the organic and fluid forms of the fractals; the colorful portions are contrastive not only through hue, but also in shape: though maintaining the repetitive fractal pattern, the pointed spiraling cones seem to be reminiscent of divergent growths, nesting upon the soft white spirals. Perhaps Cox in this way, aimed to explore the complex relationship between the natural and the artificially manufactured, between the busyness of nature and the repetition of the world of mass production and consumerism. Her pieces thus seem to examine both the fundamental similarities and differences of natural versus industrialized places. This exploration seems especially relevant to the place of the Adirondacks, where within the blue line there are spaces of wilderness alongside industrialized areas, both luring tourists to the park in seemingly contrastive ways. Perhaps, as explored through Cox's pieces, these places possess more similarities than I previously thought.