Trudy Myrrh Reagan creates art inspired by science. Her luminous paintings on clear Plexiglas—described as “stained glass windows for a new age” by UC-Santa Cruz mathematician Ralph Abraham—evoke concepts of nature, physics and cosmology.
Science and technology readily “intertwingle” with art, says Myrrh (her professional name). That has certainly been true in her life. Her mother was a poet; her father was a geologist who illustrated his scientific papers with ink drawings instead of photos. At Stanford, Myrrh found a mentor in art professor Matt Kahn, who showed nature slides and aboriginal art in class and encouraged students to explore new media such as plastics. After graduation, Myrrh enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute and married Daryl Reagan, MA ’49, PhD ’55, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
In the 1970s, she began to encounter other artists using science and technology in their work, as well as scientists and computer programmers interested in exploring artistic connections. In 1980, Myrrh founded a networking group to bring together these isolated players in what was then an avant-garde arts movement. She named the group YLEM (pronounced eye-lem)—a cosmology term meaning “the primordial matter that flared forth and made the universe,” she explains.
Today, the nonprofit has nearly 200 members around the world, holds bimonthly forums at San Francisco’s Exploratorium and displays an electronic gallery on the web. Members’ works include “robotic sculptures,” images incorporating displays of brain activity, abstract paintings on 8-millimeter film, and words hand-painted on a computer, then marred with scratches and blurs. One of the more whimsical creations is a “sound/video/kinetic information event” that changes in real time based on the positions of San Francisco’s Muni trains as they move about the city. The video shows what passengers are seeing, and a “Magic Muni Chair” vibrates in resonance with real train movements.
Myrrh’s own pieces include a naturalistic painting of a thistle surrounded by a ring of crystals, conveying, she says, “the Pythagorean recognition that numbers govern form.” Another (left) is a kaleidoscopic ball that’s hard to decipher. Myrrh points to several details. The zigzag lines look like a fractal pattern, or perhaps a convoluted maze. They also suggest a universe of looping paths, as proposed by chaos theory. Might the ball represent the origin of the universe, or our increasingly complex notion of the cosmos? On a human level, does it challenge us to consider the need for global connectedness in the wake of September 11? Or could it symbolize the maze through which artists and scientists have stumbled over the centuries, asking similar questions but taking separate paths?
Myrrh says all of these thoughts occurred to her while she was painting it. The title sums them up: Intertwingled.
