Rune Mields

In memoriam Tschu Schi-ki, 1980

After working professionally as a bookseller, Rune Mields, who is selftaught, has been a free-lance artist in Cologne since the 1970s.  Rune Mield’s artistic activities focus on analysing orders by pictorial and painterly means. She assembles studies and bundles existing order systems in order to lay their structures open to visual experience in her pictures. Alongside mathematical systems from a wide variety of high cultures, she studies central questions posed by geometry, and those relating to the magic square, central perspective, number systems in China, Babylon and Egypt and primal order in various creation myths.  Here the central reference points are arithmetic and geometry, in other words the representation of numbers of flat basic forms.  The artist writes as follows about how her work In memoriam Tschu Schi-ki, which exists in various versions, came into being: “The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal died in 1662. His estate was found to contain the so-called Pascal’s triangle, which was to become very important for mathematics. Tschu Schi-ki’s mathematics book appeared in China in 1303. In it he referred to an unknown 12th century master as the discoverer of this triangle, and illustrated it in his work.” (R.M. 1980)