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Lot Essay
In 1996 Gascoigne completed a number of works on the theme of Summer, with names such as Summer Long, Summer Divided and Summer Swarm. Utilising one of her best known mediums, the retro-reflective road signs, she created visually dramatic works that in her signature style relied upon minimal interference with her chosen material for their impact.
The classic Minimalist grid structure that Gascoigne gravitated towards in her later two-dimensional wall-pieces is disrupted in Indian Summer by the addition of the scraped-back vertical strip of pink masonite. Through this addition, the assemblage acquires the appearance of a diptych, with the markings underneath the soft matt pink paint and the unity of the single vertical board balancing the fading overlay of text on the shiny divided yellow surface on the right. As Gascoigne's husband and archivist Ben noted: " this meticulous positioning of often rough, seemingly ill-fashioned pieces was certainly one of her best-known characteristics." (Drill Hall cat, p.11)
The re-orientation of the retro-reflective roadsigns into art has the effect of re-creating meaning on a number of levels. Their original purpose was to warn of impending danger and their efficacy thus depended upon their conveyance of a visual immediacy and instantaneous comprehensibility. A measure of this visual immediacy is retained in the bright yellow hue but time and the weathered surfaces to which Gascoigne was inevitably drawn has softened the impact, (a process that is furthered by the cutting up of the text), so that what were formerly imperative commands now falter into illegibility and become meaningless. Gascoigne's arrangement of this material into art thus becomes more than a recycling of the discarded and a use of the 'found' object, for her conscious manipulation with the original purpose of the material opens the work up to theoretical interpretations regarding the nature of sign-systems and the constant evolution of both tangible objects and intangible systems of meaning.
Estate of Rosalie Gascoigne
The classic Minimalist grid structure that Gascoigne gravitated towards in her later two-dimensional wall-pieces is disrupted in Indian Summer by the addition of the scraped-back vertical strip of pink masonite. Through this addition, the assemblage acquires the appearance of a diptych, with the markings underneath the soft matt pink paint and the unity of the single vertical board balancing the fading overlay of text on the shiny divided yellow surface on the right. As Gascoigne's husband and archivist Ben noted: " this meticulous positioning of often rough, seemingly ill-fashioned pieces was certainly one of her best-known characteristics." (Drill Hall cat, p.11)
The re-orientation of the retro-reflective roadsigns into art has the effect of re-creating meaning on a number of levels. Their original purpose was to warn of impending danger and their efficacy thus depended upon their conveyance of a visual immediacy and instantaneous comprehensibility. A measure of this visual immediacy is retained in the bright yellow hue but time and the weathered surfaces to which Gascoigne was inevitably drawn has softened the impact, (a process that is furthered by the cutting up of the text), so that what were formerly imperative commands now falter into illegibility and become meaningless. Gascoigne's arrangement of this material into art thus becomes more than a recycling of the discarded and a use of the 'found' object, for her conscious manipulation with the original purpose of the material opens the work up to theoretical interpretations regarding the nature of sign-systems and the constant evolution of both tangible objects and intangible systems of meaning.
Estate of Rosalie Gascoigne