KATHY STRAUSS

In the past, I was often asked why I chose to work with scientific images, and why I chose to represent these images with the obscure and generally ‘fringe’ media of batik. Sci-art is now much more common and quite acceptable, but the fiber arts still lag in both popular and educated cultures. I feel now, as I always have, that these can be as expressive as other, more mainstream media. I have many problems with some ideas of the late Dr. Werner Heisenberg, but feel he was spot on with the following speculation:

"I would think that progress in the arts takes place in the following way: First a slow historical process transforms the life of men in spite of themselves, and thereby throws up fresh ideas. A few talented artists then try to give these ideas a visible or audible form by wresting new possibilities of expression from the materials with which they work - from colors or musical instruments. This interplay, or if you like, this struggle between the expressive content and the limitations of the expressive medium is I think, a sine qua non of the emergence of real art. If the limitations of the expressive medium were taken away - if in music, for instance, we could produce any sounds we liked - then the struggle would be over, and the artists' efforts would reach into a void."

Werner Heisenberg
Physics and Beyond

Selected Work Samples
(click to view large size)

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