Gisèle De Meur (GDM)

Statement

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.

Artworks

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!