Gisèle De Meur (GDM)

Plastician Artist, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and past Director of MATsch (Research Laboratory of Mathematics for Human Sciences)
Department of Social and Political Sciences, Université libre de Bruxelles.
Brussels, Belgium.

After 30 rewarding years teaching mathematics to students in social sciences, more time is now freed for my quite longstanding 'GDM' life as a plastician artist creating, amongst others, 'mathart' works. A domain I indeed had the pleasure to lead and explore, mainly at a national level, in a recent event at the Université libre de Bruxelles, also the subject of a paper at this conference: 'An Inspiring Art & Math Exhibition with Workshops'.

The work presented here belongs to a series I composed for that exhibition to illustrate a geometrical concept foreign to the general public : 'The Affine Plane of 9 Points'. It evidently aligns cats, my pets of choice to invite in joy- and playful ways lay(wo)men to unlikely strange math objects.

National Catted Affine Plane of 9 Points (in installation 'Le Trésor de Mathou', see website)
National Catted Affine Plane of 9 Points (in installation 'Le Trésor de Mathou', see website)
10 x 50 cm
colored paper images glued on a paper strip framed in a wood parallelogram
2012

This 'Affine Plane of 9 Points' concept, 'strange "plane", other world of dimension 2' indeed, belongs to 'finite' or 'discrete' geometries treating spaces possessing only a finite number of points, whose curves are no longer characterized by a continuous 'trace' ('without lifting the pencil'), but merely by enouncing their constitutive points. The set of its 9 points is structured by straight lines distributed in 4 directions, each with 3 parallel lines. Each 'direction' is symbolically represented by a convention, e.g. the placing of a colored mark.

Here a row of 9 walking cats formed of 4 letters in their permutations chosen among 3 colors: red, yellow and black ...that might incidentally remind the viewer of a certain national flag!