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#29 The Swing of the Sixties (and Seventies)

I believe that 20th Century Art is at the beginning of a tremendous revelation about vision and light…
Peter Sedgley, 1970

For our past few posts we’ve concentrated on the Exhibition Hall, formerly in the Berkeley’s basement before moving to the newly constructed Arts Building in 1978. We’ve one final post to make on a particular artist that featured in that space – Peter Sedgley.

Peter’s works are well known and often exhibited, with 14 held by the Tate, and indeed several in Trinity own collection, now curated by Catherine Giltrap. The still works are visually stunning, and seem to have a luminescence of their own.

For Peter’s optical and kinetic works, with their interplay of motion, colour and illumination, you get the full “wow factor” when you see video (or see them in the flesh!). One might say that Peter’s works from this time speak to the age they were created in, but with the same of sense of retro-futurism that the Berkeley itself has, preparing for a future that never was.

Peter has very kindly allowed us to feature stills and video of some of his pieces:

For a little background, let’s crib from A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (3 ed.), to which we conveniently subscribe:

Op and Kinetic artist, born in London. He had no formal artistic training and until 1959 he worked as an assistant in various architectural practices. He then joined the RAF and was discharged with ignominy in 1960. He began to paint in 1963, influenced by Bridget Riley, with whom in 1968 he set up S.P.A.C.E. (Space Provision, Artistic, Cultural and Educational), a scheme for providing studio space for young artists. In 1967 Sedgley began to incorporate lights in his work, for example in his ‘video-rotors’— painted rotating discs on which a variety of electronically programmed light patterns were played. From about 1970 he has experimented with combining sound with colour; often he works on a large scale, creating environments in which spectator movement triggers photoelectric cells, causing colours to change. Since the early 1970s Sedgley has lived mainly in Germany and he has an international reputation as one of the most inventive artists in his field.

 

Below is the flyer and pamphlet for the opening of Peter’s show in TCD in May 1970, from the Library’s own collection:

The film below dates from 1980, but the eagle-eyed will have noted that Peter displayed a “water film” for us in 1970.

…and here are some stills from the Light Ballet piece from 1973.

…and a video for Soundscreen, an installation from 1979:

Thanks again, Peter, for allowing us to feature these pieces. All images and video of Peter’s work are © Peter Sedgley and used with permission of the artist.

The title of this post refers to the exhibition The Swing of the Sixties: Trinity’s College Gallery, which travelled around Ireland in 2015-16 before a residency in the new public library at Dun Laoghaire. Along with many other artists from the 60s, this featured one of Peter’s works.