artist list

Behind Pawley’s giclee print 17.5 x 22

Artist Biography:

Mary Edna Fraser has been exploring and photographing coastlines around the world from the open cockpit of her grandfather's 1946 Ercoupe airplane for nearly a quarter of a century.

Fraser focuses on barrier islands, the sandy, attenuated, ever-shifting buffers between ocean and mainland that, from a bird's-eye view, present some of nature's most striking patterns. She translates those patterns into batiks, artworks that also aid her mission to preserve the barrier islands. The batiks range in size from one square foot (30 square centimeters) to some displays that are five stories tall.

Fraser was first inspired while riding with her brother above the Sea Islands of Georgia, looking below she was overwhelmed by the beauty of what she saw.

She has exhibited her batiks, a traditional ancient art form in which designs are created on fabric by masking regions with wax, and then dyeing, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Duke University Museum of Art, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.

Fraser has collaborated with Orrin Pilkey, a geologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., on the recently published, "A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands" (Columbia University Press). Her batiks show the islands' majesty and illustrate the science behind their formation.

Mary Edna Fraser

Charleston

Visit Artist's Website

About the Work:

“My life’s work is from an aerial perspective, a view of the earth I choose to transcribe onto silk using dyes in the ancient medium of batik. The art comprises a series of narrative landscapes inspired by the terraqueous reaches of the continent -- where separate realms of earth, sea and, sky converge. Each area is carefully researched by often hiking the terrain, exploring the waterways by boat, and painting watercolor studies on location. Books and charts are studied to identify features of visual interest.”

Photographing from the open windows of my grandfather’s ‘46 Ercoupe plane with my father or brother as pilots, we explore the natural wonders unaltered by man. Sometimes I employ a native pilot who shows me his or her familiar landscape such as the canyons of northern New Mexico or the Appalachian mountains. Satellite images and maps are used to plan expansive compositions. During an excursion, as many as five hundred images will be photographed which will then be reduced to the best twenty possible designs. An organization of the land emerges revealed only by altitude.

After the flight, monotypes are printed on paper before the actual batiking begins. Once familiar with the subject, colors are chosen and ideas formulated. Compositional influences of traditional Japanese wood block prints from the Edo period are employed in the format and depiction of the floating world. Impressionist and modern painters are pulled into the image in my mind’s eye. A sensitive interplay of color and form emerges as the past, present, and future are considered.

Color is an emotional rather than realistic response, the design often abstracted. The slowness of the unforgiving medium gives time to reflect on the thoughts and emotions feeding into the artwork. The goal is to evoke a sense of place that differentiates locations. The exquisiteness of a fleeting moment is captured on silk with dyes, attempting to share with the viewer a moment of visual poetry.