Maria Bussmann is a 'philosophical' artist. She wrote a Ph.D. in philosophy, while she also began practicing art. She has always combined her academic work with art making, and made a mark for herself by doing reflective drawings on major works by philosophers. Her early contribution was a set of drawings inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus. More recently, she has turned to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher who is concerned with human perceptual - and particularly bodily- experiences. Bussmann has reflected upon this important Twentieth century work, and produced this evokative series of drawings. She combines her own experience of her body with Merleau-Ponty's reflections upon 'lived experience,' corps vecu. Here philosophy and art meet incarnate.

Don Ihde
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director, The Technoscience Research Group,
SUNY, Stony Brook