JACKY REDGATE
Installation photograph of Jacky Redgate’s works (left) Light Throw (Mirrors) No. 1, 2009, and (right) Mirror, 2010. From the exhibition Travellers from Australia, exhibited at the Pailia Ilektriki, Ktima Pafos, Cyprus, 2-15 October, as part of the official program of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture. Photo: Shelley Webster, 2017.
Artist Statement
I was inspired to return to the image of a cot/bed in my early artwork when, in October 2010, I went on a research trip to Cyprus as part of the University of Wollongong Senior Artists’ Research Forum. My epiphany in Cyprus, where I first visualised the domestic cot/bed as an archive, built on my early interest in grids, inventories and taxonomies. This process was particularly useful as a critical strategy and fitted with my life-long preoccupation with ordering and systems.
As well as the theatre excavation at Paphos we visited the Byzantine church in Kalopaniyotis, where there is a fresco of the miracle of the paralysed man who picked up his bed and walked. In the painting the perspective of the painting turns the bed into a clear frame and a grid. I saw my cot/bed drawing as a blueprint for a three-dimensional object, with its chronological sequence combined with an almost archaeological excavation of memory, re-enacted through diagrams of space.
Archaeology is related to the mathematical system of topology, and the authority of the archivist comes from interpreting objects in the archive. As I drew the archival space of the cot I was returned to the intimate place of my childhood trauma. I then assembled texts from early notebooks into typologies, which I made into indexes which became essential tools in Light Throw (Mirrors).
I have been drawn to Sigmund Freud’s comparison of psychoanalysis to archaeology. The processes of both appeal to me, as I am deeply obsessed with collecting and retrieving objects, situations and experiences (living entities) into typologies. In my work I approach and repeat my own memories and hallucinations, my collection of family documents somewhat like an analyst, but perhaps more like a reflective archaeologist. I compared the idea of the substrate in a photograph to the sorting trays in the Paphos Theatre site.
My methodology in my photographs Light Throw (Mirrors) (2009—), is my on-going exploration of photography, light, objects and space, using mirrors by staging and photographing objects in my bedroom studio. The result was an almost dislocating effect of the light, focus and perspective. The rebounding light across my adult bed coincidently produced a strange hallucinatory effect that recalled my childhood visions.
In Cyprus I observed and documented typologies of animals, beds and heads, as well as typologies of mirrors and shadows drawn from the geometric patterns of the Paphos Roman and Byzantine mosaics. The different treatments of light in frescoes,mosaics and icons expanded my idea of the repertoire of light and its meaning, and how it stretches beyond the artificial and natural, to the divine.
Visiting archaeological sites in Cyprus became a collecting place and a framework for my analysis of my childhood visions. It provided a visual and textual scaffold for me to relate to my childhood illness, trauma and hallucinations and to see glimpses of the child in my current practice.
Jacky Redgate, June 2017.
Biography
Jacky Redgate was born in London 1955 and emigrated to Australia in 1967. With a BA South Australian School of Art 1980 and MVA Sydney College of the Arts 1998 she completed a Doctor of Creative Arts degree, University of Wollongong, 2014. She has been part of the Biennale of Sydney and Australian Perspecta and has held solo shows at major museums and galleries including the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Career highlights also include: Curator, 1967: Selected works from the MCA Collection, Sydney (2004–05) and 1st prize Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011). She has produced a remarkable body of work in photography and sculpture, held in all significant national collections, combining abstraction and a mask of mirrors, often in association with timeless typologies of objects She travelled to Cyprus to the Paphos theatre excavation in 2010. She is a Senior Lecturer Visual Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW Australia.A monograph of her work Jacky Redgate: Mirrors by Ann Stephen and Robert Leonard was produced in 2015 (University of Sydney and Power Publications).