Revealing a major new direction on her oeuvre, the sculpture to be presented at Galerie Gabriel Rolt was forged from - quite literally – a meticulous act of productive destruction of much of Hedgecock’s output from the last ten years. Large-scale drawings (including a two meter flayed sheep from 2001, and a three-meter high cloaked Virgin from 2003) have been cut and folded into triangulated forms and then glued together. The resulting enormous, seven-meter presence incumbents itself upon the gallery, seemingly moving through the space as if a cracking, molten flow of lava that makes a mockery of its light-weight paper body.
In geometry, a ‘stellation’ describes the three-dimensional projection of a two- dimensional plan. This relationship (for Hedgecock), echoes that between sculpture and drawing, something that she is continuously exploring in her work. In antiquity, stellations were believed by many to underlie the visible world: an idea that further fascinates Hedgecock and one that has formed the backdrop to much of her thinking for this exhibition.
Looking at the innumerable facets across the main sculpture, one frequently catches glimpses a fragment of a drawing - sometimes a fold of fabric or piece of hair – all of which can be dated and attributed accordingly. As a whole, the piece seems to map out a topographical landscape of Hedgecock’s recent output; her drawings have become sculpture; the hundreds upon thousands of tiny, stellated forms that comprise it each staking their own claim for order against the formlessness of the object’s whole, and traditional boundaries between the mark and the object are violently collapsed.
The state of flux is continued in other works in the exhibition. Hedgecock’s turbulent drawings seem to seek out the underlying algebraic and geometric paths and relationships found in nature, as if the act of drawing itself might somehow decode the structures of carbon, the minute constellations of a seeding fruit, or the skeletal remains that lie suspended within the ocean’s soft, radiolarian ooze. Likewise, her sculptures made from an infinite number of tiny, glued polystyrene balls defy not only gravity but take on the form of natural, slow growing and accumulative entities, such as moss covered tree trunks or forests of multi-coloured coral.
Opening
Opening reception: Saturday 19, 17.00 – 19.30 hrs.