Time-cones 1998 Click on the images

Iceland, Europe, America

The second garment-work “Time-cones”, which was created on an occasion of local Art festival in June 1998, the artist picked out some thirty friends and acquaintances, colleagues from abroad as well as countrymen, handout to them dresses T-shirts on which were printed geometric symbols. The group of people could use the clothes during the next two months. They ver kindly asked to document their use of the garment and send the video film to the artist.

The text is an translation of a review on Radhildur Ingadottir’s artworks in the cultural magazine Skirnir, spring 1999. It was written by the art historian Audur Olafsdottir.

An inspiration and touchstone for the recent work of Radhildur Ingadottir is a mother-of-pearl shell that has been cut to reveal theelegance of its logarithmic spiral. This image of the way an organism unfolds in space over a period of time parallels another image ofspace-time, that of the time cone. The image of the cone is used by-noted cosmologist Stephen Hawking to describe the interdependence
of spatial and temporal conditions. At a recent exhibition at Nylistasafnið / The Living Art Museum (March 13 - 29, 1998), the artist drew time cones directly on the wall. While Hawking´s diagram
was an initial starting point, the artist re-presented the cone image, using its geometric logic to extend and elaborate the form--as if in the elaboration of the time cone, one might re-imagine time itself.
The artist´s time cones will reappear on dresses and t-shirts to be worn by thirty persons between mid-May and mid-June of 1998, the period of Reykjavík´s annual arts festival. The artist describes these clothing works as yet another form of mail-delivery coincident with an ongoing series of letters the artist began in 1996. These letters are mailed to individuals as well as passed out in public places. The
first letter, dated October 12, 1996, announced the time of a solar eclipse. Since then the letters--sometimes including drawings of the orbits of celestial bodies--have continued to draw attention to cosmic events. With this recent clothing work, the artist will use the human body to initiate an orbiting of the time cone drawings--an image described by the artist as nothing less and nothing more than "a beautiful thought."

The text is written by the art historian Eva Heisler

back