Through the Artist’s Eye

“This really shows my love of nature.”

Mary Torrance holds up a ceramic statue. It’s a tree stump, shaped as though bark has been peeling off after years of growth. She points to one spot on the side of the stump.

“I tore up a little Brillo® to make it look like dead plants.”

The statue depicts some of Mary’s favorite organisms: a mushroom, with its bright red underbelly, sits next to a fly and a frog, which in turn faces a coiled snake with piercing eyes.

“It’s the cycle of life. The frog is about to eat the fly, and the snake is about to eat the frog!” she says with a laugh.

Nature, and capturing it through her artwork, has played a pivotal role in Mary’s life. Raised in South Dakota, Mary studied art in Germany before returning to the States to train as a medical and biological illustrator at Johns Hopkins. She eventually became the departmental artist at the Department of Cytopathology.