Jacky Redgate’s debut, solo exhibition with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert presents a captivating installation of geometric sculptures. UNFOLDING SOLIDS, 2022 comprises beguiling artworks that reflect Redgate’s abiding interest in mathematics and its influence on modernist abstraction in the context of minimalism and conceptual art.
UNFOLDING SOLIDS, 2022 is based on and develops further, Equal Solids, 25,196,000 cubic mm, a sculptural installation that Redgate first explored in the early 1990s. At the time, Redgate was making sculpture and photography derived from geometric and mathematical systems - particularly Solid Euclidian geometry, Topology, and higher Four-Dimensional Geometry, which sits outside of perception.
Oktahedroid, the first sculpture in UNFOLDING SOLIDS, 2022, was originally conceived as a maquette for a public artwork at the Olympic Stadium in 1998. Redgate remarks: “returning to this maquette and corresponding research has filled some gaps in my practice and also extended it with the realisation of sculptures which demonstrate the possibility of visualising the fourth dimension in solid sculptural forms.”
Whilst on a residency at the La Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Redgate researched the writings of mathematician Henri Poincaré, the founder of the field of Topology. Redgate experienced, first-hand, three-dimensional models made at the end of the 19th century which aimed to illustrate Descriptive Geometry exercises and algebraic equations. Redgate was fascinated with how these forms had been actualised (from metal, wire, plaster, and wood) and aware that these same models had inspired artists such as Man Ray, Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth.
Redgate has extended her investigations into Four-Dimensional Geometry by looking to 19th century mathematicians and the work of artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Antoine Pevsner who based their work on visualisations of the Fourth Dimension, and further research into the production and publication of mathematical models by Ludwig Brill and Martin Schilling, which were made to aid in the teaching of fine art and architecture,
In UNFOLDING SOLIDS, 2022, Redgate presents eight hand-made, constructed, wooden and steel sculptures based on drawings depicting surfaces of solids and unfolded figures of Four-Dimensional figures by 19th Century mathematicians - including, William Stringham, Claude Bragdon and Alicia Boole Stott.
Redgate interprets Four-Dimensional Geometry into three dimensions. Four-fold figures, such as an Unfolded Hypercube, Part of an unfolded Hypercube, Penthedroid, Oktahedroid and Hexadekahedroid, and their 3-fold boundaries, are spread out symmetrically into three-dimensional space. Their sharp- pointed “summits” and “stellated”, star-shaped formations stand upright, balancing on points. Each sculpture is made using the square or triangle - the vertical and the diagonal, the forms inherently respond to light.
Redgate says that: “the visualisations of Four-Dimensional Geometry are analogues of the three- dimensional Platonic Solids, however unlike the Platonic Solids, these objects are almost impossible to visualise as sculpture.”
The installation comprises beautiful and fascinating objects which offer a concrete vision of Redgate’s ideas and thought processes.
