Welcome
... to a virtual space on Serendip shaped by Sharon
Burgmayer and containing water colors she painted during two years ending
May, 2002.
Sharon is, among
other things, a professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr
College, a lover of flowers, and the mother of two sons. Sharon and her husband,
Paul Burgmayer, are active participants in civic affairs and in the Presbyterian
church. During the years when the paintings were done, Paul thought about
and then initiated a career change from industrial chemist to pre-college
teacher.
For Sharon, the year was also one of telling and retelling her own story.
She discovered the Serendip web site, and felt an affinity for its message
that "life's instructions are always ambiguous and incomplete ... and
hence need to be continually examined and rewritten". That in turn led
to a friendship and continuing series of conversations with Paul Grobstein,
one of Serendip's founders and a neurobiologist interested in the relationship
between the brain and human expererience.
What are the relations between science and art? Between science and religion?
Between the individual and communities? Between the unconscious and consciousness
and the brain? What is creativity, and how does it relate to day to day life,
and to beauty, to "quality", to happiness? These are some of the
themes threaded through "transformation".
Come on in ...
see what you can find.
Leave your thoughts in an on-line forum area, as your contributions to others'
explorations.
It is not the answers but rather what one discovers by asking and re-asking
the questions that is important here. Sharon's water colors are an invitation
to do that ... and this virtual space is an invitation to share discoveries,
to learn from the different ways that different people see the
same images. What do you see in these images? in the space Sharon has created
to contain them? Your thoughts are an important part of the ongoing evolution
of this space, and of the exploration of "life's instructions" from
which the images come and to which they contribute.
Paul Grobstein
for Serendip
Exhibitions | Science and Culture | Serendip ... copywright Serendip June 2002