• AISLING HEDGECOCK
• 11 MAY – 9 JUNE 2013 
•  

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth.                                                                                       – Benoit Mandelbrot

 
Akershus Kunstsenter is delighted to present new works by British artist Aisling Hedgecock. In this, her first exhibition in Norway, Hedgecock presents a series of sculptures and a major drawing, alongside other work on paper. All works have been created especially for this exhibition and reflect time examining the interstice between Euclidian geometry and formlessness.

Marking a new direction in her work Hedgecock presents a series of bright, chromatic metal frameworks, housed within these open geometric structures are clouds of her signature coloured polystyrene granules. Francis Bacon’s Head V1, 1949, a reworking of Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650, displays his characteristic use of a framework around the physical body heightening the sense of entrapment. In a similar register, the introduction of sharp linear projections provides space for the formless bio-geological growths to exist. Each exoskeleton varies in cultural reference; from Plato’s abstract building blocks of life, the cube and tetrahedron, to shapes that nod towards plinth, vitrine, and the recognisable contents of art gallery or museum. Hedgecock plays with the tensions brought together in these collisions, ordering colour and material to evoke relationships that range from the insidious and parasitical to the harmonious and universal.

The large-scale pencil drawing We Are Stardust takes its title from the chorus of Woodstock, the renowned Joni Mitchell song featured on the album Ladies of the Canyon (1970). The drawing is constructed from thousands of minuscule graphite circles revealing the skeletal structure of a large mammal. The result is an entropic and embryonic image momentarily fossilized on the surface of the paper before it disappears from sight, back to the stuff of stardust. Essentially a protest song, the Woodstock lyrics bring to mind a journey that traverses both galactic nebulae and an earthly Arcadia set against the psychedelic blaze of 1960’s American radical idealism.