Samuel Verbiese

Doctor in Mechanical Engineering/Structures in a previous life, now free-lance plastician artist
Overijse, Belgium

Besides expressionnistic painting and sculpting of the figure and portrait, I am recurrently drawn into geometric projects, probably by previous life.

This year I present two 3-D prints by Materialise (Leuven, Belgium) of works previously shown 2-D :
- a Golden Pyramid, in echo to my paper in the present conference and to a work I was accepted to present at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco in January 2010 (http://www.anneburns.net/jmm10/verbiese.html), and
- a microChartres labyrinth projected reverse on a cube I showed in Bridges 2009 in Banff (http://www.bridgesmathart.org/art-exhibits/bridges2009/verbiese.html)

Due to the highly educational content presented at several workshops for children, the works are again presented on a table in an "installation" setting including posters/pictures/models as explanatory material.

'Fractal' Golden Pyramid
'Fractal' Golden Pyramid
183 x 112 x 150 mm
3-D print (stereolithography) in see-through resin
2010

My Golden Pyramid is a truss that can project (when viewed from underneath, at a precise, quite near point, orthogonally to the back golden triangular face) into the K5 graph (pentagram inscribed in a pentagon) with remarkable proportions (two equilateral and two golden triangles on a golden rectangular base featuring its two diagonals). The model has its struts built here, kind of fractally, from 463 slightly overlapping tiny golden pyramids. The software used for modelling were Scott Vorthmann's vZome and Materialise's Magics. Thanks for their respective help.

MicroChartres labyrinth projected reverse on a cube
MicroChartres labyrinth projected reverse on a cube
251 x 114 x 147 mm
3-D printing (stereolithography) in see-through resin
2010

The idea stemmed from the desire to design a labyrinth that followed the theme of the garden fair "Les Jardins d'Aywiers", devoted in the spring of 2008 to the bees. An hexagonal symmetry resulted , complete with bee cells (thanks extended to Patricia Limauge for kindly inviting me). Contemplating this, readily lead to projecting the microChartres on a cube, and this, in an 'inverted' way, i.e.: the labyrinth path on top of the domed cubic wall and the maze "wall" in the bottom of the cube. The object was further developed into a building accessible from the Ariadne thread at ground level. Four tunnels between dead-ends have been added to transform the maze into a circuit, which can be seen thanks to the see-through nature of the used material.