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Mary Edna Fraser x
Mary Edna Fraser has been exploring and photographing coastlines around the world from the open cockpit of her grandfather's 1946 Ercoupe airplane for nearly a quarter of a century. Fraser focuses on barrier islands, the sandy, attenuated, ever-shifting buffers between ocean and mainland that, from a bird's-eye view present some of nature's most striking patterns. She translates those patterns into batiks, artworks that also aid her mission to preserve the barrier island. The batiks range in size from one square foot (30 square centimeters) to some displays that are five stories tall. Fraser was first inspired while riding with her brother above the Sea Islands of Georgia, looking below she was overwhelmed by the beauty of what she saw. She has exhibited her batiks, a traditional ancient art form in which designs are created on fabric by masking regions with wax, and then dying, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Duke University Museum of Art, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Science Foundation. Fraser has collaborated with Orrin Pilkey, a geologist at Duke University in Durham, NC, on the recently published, A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands (Columbia University Press). Her batiks show the island's majesty and illustrate the science behind their formation.