Gary Woodley

Gary Woodley

Impingement No. 66 ‘Cube Circumscribed by Tetrahedron – Tetrahedron Circumscribed by Cube’ 2017

Gary Woodley works in many three-dimensional media including architectural interventions using various lighting technologies. He has been researched three-dimensional CAD modelling systems for topological projections onto real and virtual spaces. For many years, he has been making the exquisite wall drawings called impingements that play with our perception of the surfaces and edges of architectural space and conceptualise sculptural volumes within the mass of the walls.

The great post-impressionist French painter Cézanne proposed: ‘treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone’. Woodley’s ‘impingements’ are concerned with the interaction between ideas and reality, how a ‘platonic’ form can be in dialogue with a physical architectural space. The function of Coronation Parade as a pedestrian way is secondary to its main role as a cliff-stabilising piece of engineering, which places it somewhere between Cézanne’s landscape and Woodley’s more regularly used architecture.

Impingement No. 66, takes two pairs simple geometric solids (four sided and six sided) with a cube inside a tetrahedron and a tetrahedron inside a cube. It ‘projects’ these paired figures onto and ‘through’ the massive structure of Coronation Parade. The cubes are in white paint, the tetrahedrons in black. Starting with two cubes (spaced one cube apart) the two tetrahedra are the same size, whilst the cube that circumscribes its tetrahedron has been stretched to encompass it.

Find more of Gary Woodley's work.

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