The Golden Spiral

M.L. Snowden’s “Mathematica Aurea” Collection forges a new chapter for the art of bronze. In these works, Snowden’s creative vision has invented a series of trail-blazing meditations on enduring mathematical principles that permeate the natural world; principles that have occupied the highest echelons of contemplation since the time of Plato and Einstein.

With  “The Golden Spiral”, known throughout the mathematical world  as a specialized form of the Spira Mirabilis or the Logarithmic Spiral, Snowden intuits lines and  patterns of growth through the curvature of bronze. Conch shells; fern heads and rose buds; the prospect of trees broadening into the realm of plant growth; the nerves of the cornea of the human eye and the shape of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, all demonstrate the lush harmony that inheres in the Logarithmic Spiral. In the case of “The Golden Spiral”, its width increases from its point of origin by a factor of Pi (3.141593 in decimal notation) for every quarter turn it makes. In Snowden’s Golden Spiral, the design reaches beyond mathematical ratios to embrace a range of spirals that include the Helix, Archimedean, and other curvatures as two classic figures exuding timeless accord become a single entity engaged in harmonic growth. These figures, “reach into the energy of the spiral and form a direct mediation on how Golden curvature is infused into earthly physical mediums. The curvature of the spiral infuses our own human selves and infiltrates the very substance of bronze sculpture reminding us of how our own substance as human beings, like that of bronze, celebrates the energies imparted by the rounded Logarithmic Spiral.”