About Me

Mary Hale Visser Professor of Art and Brown Chair holder teaches sculpture and computer modeling at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Visser's artwork has appeared in more than 125-juried exhibitions and has received awards such as the “Design Excellence Award" from the City of Austin Design Commission, a Mellon Technology Fellowship, and a Mundy Fellowship for her research in rapid prototyping sculptural forms.

Visser has completed several large-scale public and private commissions installed in the cities of Washington, D.C.; Sacramento, California; Austin, Texas; Lenexus, Kansas and Columbus, Ohio. Her artwork was selected for the e-Form exhibition of rapid prototyped sculptures to tour China during the 2008 Olympic games. Her work has been included in several multimedia and video presentations in the United States and Europe. Visser’s artwork has been featured in Texas Monthly, Artspace, Ceramics Monthly, Sculpture International and in the book, A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas.

Visser is one of the first group of international artists who pioneered the use of rapid prototyping and digital technologies in sculpture. She is vice president of Ars Mathematica of Paris, France an international non-profit organization devoted to promoting digital sculpture. The Director of Ars Mathematica Christian Lavigne and Professor Visser are writing a book on the history and pioneers of digital sculpture soon to be published. Visser’s research focuses on the use of digital 3D modeling and rapid prototyping to create complex abstract figurative sculptures.

My Philosophy

How extraordinary it is to be human, struggling to communicate, to live a meaningful life, albeit so briefly.

 

I search for the soul from whence all life comes. Myths, legends, stories and poems of individual human endeavors draw me in to search for that elusive spirit, the intangible made real. What is it that we see in an individual human action that changes the soul, thus, changes all people through the actions of this one being? What compelled that action that puts the individual at risk to change the whole community for the better.

 

As one can see body language is essential to my work and solid modeling allows me to incorporate the delicate gestures, subtle contours and complex structure of the body into a detailed rhythm of forms and gestures.

 

For me as an artist, I have moved perceptually from viewing and using the human form as a sculptural form to one of using the human being as a metaphor for spiritual interaction that changes the community, thus, the spirit as it were being bodily present in the world. I am drawn to record these events, these examples of this human spirit. It is this elusive spirit that drives all human beings to create. It is this life force that I pursue in using the human body to recreate the individual effort.

My Research

My field of research is in the application of rapid prototyping processes and their impact upon the education and the development of three-dimensional knowledge for the student.

The term rapid prototyping (RP) refers to a class of technologies that can rapidly construct physical models from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data. These "three dimensional printers" allow designers to quickly create tangible prototypes of their designs, rather than just two-dimensional pictures. Drawing from the cutting edge of this research into Rapid Prototyping as an artist I am able to create a work of art within the virtual reality world of the computer and bring that work into the physical world at any scale. Most importantly, I can use any data to create a physical form. Not only can I create forms from scans of real world objects and rearranged this scanned data to create new forms, but I can go beyond this normal mode in the artistic process to work with data that previously was used only to record sound or light. I can make physical forms of ephemeral information from data that comes from music, voices, data streams, movement, cloud formations, internal and external workings of the human form.