The Third Stellation, Solo Presentation with Galerie Gabriel Rolt Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2011
Press Release
Galerie Gabriel Rolt is delighted to present a series of new works by British artist Aisling Hedgecock. In this, her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Hedgecock will exhibit a large-scale sculpture that marks a major new direction in her practice, alongside a series of recent drawings and smaller sculptural works.
The Third Stellation draws its title from the idealized polyhedral forms believed from antiquity to underlie the perceivable world. Although the ordering of formlessness has been an integral part of Hedgecock’s practice to date – her polychromatic polystyrene sculptures often echo the unruly baroque of bio-geological growth – The Third Stellation reflects, primarily through drawing, the artist’s growing interest in the apparently rigid geometries found within natural entities.
In geometrical terms, a ‘stellation’ describes the three-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional plane, a spatial relationship that, for Hedgecock, echoes the dynamic interface between sculpture and drawing. The multi-faceted undulating structure that dominates the gallery collapses these categorical boundaries altogether, as it advances from wall to floor with a magma-like creep. Each triangulated facet derives from a meticulous act of productive destruction: existing large-scale graphite drawings (a two meter flayed sheep from 2001, and a three-meter high cloaked Virgin from 2003 among others) were cut, folded, and glued together to render a vast differentiated field of stellated mark-making. The turbulent character of this topological folly can be found elsewhere in drawings and smaller sculptures that appear to map fantastical landscapes undergoing seismic, even cosmic disruption. Hedgecock scrutinizes the flux of these generative worlds, charting algorithmic scale-shifting paths through spaces as diverse as the allotropic structures of carbon, the asterism of seeding fruit, or the skeletal remains suspended within the ocean’s radiolarian ooze.
Aisling Hedgecock (b. Donegal, Republic of Ireland, 1979) received a Fine Art Sculpture MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 2004. She was awarded a two-year Sainsbury Scholarship in Drawing and Sculpture at The British School at Rome, living and working in Italy until 2008, whilst regularly exhibiting in the UK and across Europe. Recent group exhibitions include Straylight Cavern at Cell, London, On Becoming a Gallery Angus Hughes Gallery, London, On Time at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and New London School at Galerie Schuster, Berlin. Hedgecock is currently based in Andalucia and London.
