Biography
Born in Philadelphia on December 28th, 1954, Zurn’s early years were influenced by her mother’s fashion design business, Lee Zurn Exclusive, and her father’s bronze sculpture restoration for MetalWeld. As a young adult, Zurn followed her mother in the family tradition of working with fabric. Early on she developed a passion for quilting and by the 1990’s, Zurn had mastered the art of contemporary quilt making, taking the traditional bed quilt, recasting it in the abstract, and resurrecting it on a wall.
Over the next 20 years, Zurn’s tireless curiosity had leapt from piecing together patterned fabrics to creating computer generated fractals. Cutting paper, now, instead of cloth, and adhering the pieces rather than sewing them together, Zurn carries her artist vision into new areas.
It is not only the medium, however, but the inspiration of Zurn’s artistic expression which casts it in a category all of its own. Returning to her nascent interest in the confluence of art and spirituality, the visual and the ephemeral, Zurn today directly informs each of her pieces with religious, literary, and psychotherapeutic texts. Zurn’s work reflects conceptual intricacies as varied as those explored by Carl Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, those expressed by Orphan Pamuk in The New Life, and those excavated by Rabbi Nehunia ben HaKana in The Bahir Illumination.
Zurn is an artist who deftly captures the uncontrollable dynamisms of spiritual touchstones in and through the eminently controlled designs of fractal collage.