Jacky Redgate is regarded as one of Australia's leading contemporary artists, with a practice extending four decades. Born in London 1955, Redgate emigrated to Australia in 1967 where her career began in the context of late 1970s feminism, minimalism and conceptual art. A key figure in Australian art since the mid-1980s, Redgate made her name as a photographer, with such classic series as Photographer Unknown, Naar Het Schilder-Boeck, and Work-To-Rule, but also works in sculpture and installation.
A common thread in her work is an interest in the differences between various systems - be they personal, such as snapshots, or impersonal, such as mathematics. Redgate's work explores the interplay of systems of perception and representation, particularly in relation to photography and what occurs in the translation of the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional images. Much of her work is a meditation on photography, its optics and gazes. Reflecting on the traditions of modernity in particular, she is well known for her mirror works using objects, light and colour, blurring distinctions between mediums, painting and photography, and genres, still life and abstraction.
