Home Selected Statements Urdang

 

 

Description from Drawing on Sculpture Bertha Urdang Gallery

 

 

 

The exhibited drawings are visual analyses of a body of sculptural work comprising more than 300 separate forms constructed intermittently over a period of five years. These may be viewed as 25 series or four conceptual sets. A period in which hollow helices were constructed from plane circular shapes was stimulated by an accidental insight into the properties of spirals. This was followed by the evolution of extensive sets of closed three-dimensional forms produced through the cyclic superposition of alternative planar subdivisions of the complete disc. Next, infintiely expanding spiral surfaces were constructed by combining pairs of repeated circular elements.

 

Embodying a dialectic of shape, line and tension, the sculpture may be classified as helical, closed and open sets. By displaying theeffects of the movements, shift, glide and rotation and variations of the width diameter ratio, it examines the origins of symmetry of both form and sequence.

 

The Con(jug)ate drawings are a schematic summarization and projection of the effects of juxtapositioning two identical elements selected from , , and . obtained from , the subdivision of a disc. The Anolatabulata drawings are a linear representation of the set of compactable though not collapsible forms derived from the subdivision of x2 . As in the Con(jug)ate series, the Anolatabulata combine as rotational, mirror and asymmetric variants. The operational photodiagram for Anolatabulata was used to combine these three sets of forms into a comprehensive spatial order which could guide their placement upon the surface of a torus. As a further refinement, this organization directed their positioning upon a pair of equilateral triangles which, folded and seamed, became the sculpture Double Zeeman - a model for spatial deployment of coherently and logically related forms.

 

Open forms--begun in 1976 and still under examination-- explore the implications of combining two identical 's where the simple conjuction produces a visual differential.

 

The forms developed in the sequence Helices-Anolatabulata-Con(jug)ates-Open. As new insights emerged, analysis, compaction and ordering ranged across the entire set. The first clearly schematic drawings examined the first Open sculpture; the most developed drawings used Anolatabulata as source material, structuring its origins and placement.

 

Drawing and sculpture together build a body of information which allows for still further development of concept and frm. An open process, a developing vocabulary, a focussing of idea through physical action and visual realization, with objects, at once notation, manifestation and stimulus for thought.

 

February, 1979.

 

 

 

Home Selected Statements Urdang