Gabriele Meyer

Statement

Aside from crocheting hyperbolic surfaces, I also like to make linoleum prints. My favorite subjects are sea shells. They have a variety of mathematical aspects: - snails embody spirals - the growth of clams often are dilations - the patterns on cone snails, volutes and others come about through mechanisms that are biological cellular automata. The curves of these sea creatures are just very beautiful and inspiring.

Artworks

This print shows the inside of an abalone (haliotis midae), where you can see its spiral. The other shell is a whelk, where the broken outside makes the spiral structure visible.

This linocut depicts an imperial volute (cymbiola imperialis). The markings on it look similar to Sierpinski triangular patterns and are generated by cellular automata, where the content of a field is determined by the contents of its neighboring fields. This process may or may not converge. But the pattern is beautiful!