A Year-Round Guide to Franklin and Nantahala

If you’re the only child of an engineer father and a financial analyst mother, there’s a good chance that you and Heather Gordon might agree on something: “I think numbers

Rosemary and Goat Cheese Strata

If you’re the only child of an engineer father and a financial analyst mother, there’s a good chance that you and Heather Gordon might agree on something: “I think numbers

Studio Tour with Durham’s Heather Gordon

heather gordon studio

heather gordon artIf you’re the only child of an engineer father and a financial analyst mother, there’s a good chance that you and Heather Gordon might agree on something: “I think numbers are beautiful,” she says. A lover of algorithms and an “analog junkie,” Gordon strives to tell stories about personal relationships using geometry, numbers, and code — she transformed a portion of Crime and Punishment into the computer code ASCII — and asymmetrical origami shapes, some large enough to walk through. Never mind the math. Just appreciate the genius.

Heather Gordon translates numbers into oil paintings like Last Woman Standing (above), a data portrait of her mother, which maps the distances between all of the places she’s lived.

This story was published on Mar 31, 2016

Susan Stafford Kelly

Susan Stafford Kelly was raised in Rutherfordton. She attended UNC-Chapel Hill and earned a Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of Carolina Classics, a collection of essays that have appeared in Our State, and five novels: How Close We Come, Even Now, The Last of Something, Now You Know, and By Accident. Susan has three grown children and lives in Greensboro with her husband, Sterling.