I arrived at this work out of an earnest desire to teach myself something about difficult, scientific concepts, which eluded me earlier in my education. After years of teaching, and working as an architect, I returned to graduate school to study product design in engineering, which made me realize that I had been using fundamental ideas without ever understanding their meaning or what they represented in physical terms. In fact, without being able to touch or see these ideas, I found myself lost in a myriad of still larger subjects such as electronics. Perhaps if teachers had painted physics for me, I might have glided through mechanical analysis. a2 + b2 = c2 might have been drawn for me, not as numbers in a right triangle, but as a relationship between gravity (the direction of "down") and the horizon (the direction of "across") as Jacob Bronowski suggested. So, I began to teach myself about sine waves and the Pythagorean Theorem with metaphors. I envisioned a way to use analogies in three-dimensional form to explain these intangible concepts to children. The metaphors grew into a collection of stories, which looks at abstract and scientific concepts and their intrinsic connections to each other and to us. Phoebe’s Field was not the original first story. In searching for a fundamental place to begin, atomic structure seemed logical at the time. But with new attention on field theory in the press, I wondered if fields might be a more essential place to start. Phoebe’s Field became that story, and now an exhibition. Fields, as a type of “glue” holding the universe together and as a base concept about space, are rich with cultural meaning and embedded metaphors.

Mitzi Vernon, Author and Principal Investigator