Sanford Biggers: a fractal approach is comprised of twenty quilt works by the artist Sanford Biggers—arranged in a grid, eight squares at its surface, twenty in its depth. By clicking on any square in the grid, the image will advance to the next. Within each square, every work can be navigated from end to end using your cursor.
Known in mathematics as self-similarity, fractal geometry presents as successive magnification or unfolding symmetry. Such is the language of crystals and galaxies, but in the practice of Sanford Biggers, scale is a tool for the discovery of both similarity and inversion. Biggers’ 2007 glass-etching, Lotus, appears from a distance as the Buddhist symbol for enlightenment, but the details of the perfectly symmetrical work reveal lotus petals comprised of bodies in the cargo hold of 18th century slave ships.