Gwen Fisher In my professional life I teach and study mathematics. My training in mathematics has helped me to more easily discover connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and forms, simplify a complicated pattern into its elementary parts, and combine those parts into new, complex forms. I weave beads to appeal to people's affinity for organization in design. I use mathematics, including geometry, symmetry, and topology, as an inspiration for the structure of my creations. Across cultures and continents, humans show a natural affinity towards the aesthetic of pattern and order, and my art appeals to this aesthetic in a tactile, tangible form. I have found that people often recognize the repetition and order in my pieces, and so my art appeals to their sense of discovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar.