Vault, no. 53, 2026.
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On 14 November 2016, just past midnight, the Earth moved. The Kaikōura quake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale. For a full minute, my eleventh-floor Wellington apartment swayed like a blade of grass and my bookshelves rippled like jelly, disgorging their contents. My commonsense coordinates collapsed and the real rushed in. The quake rattled my expectations of what was physically possible. Normal transmission was rapidly restored, but things would never be the same. When I saw Jacky Redgate’s show at Naarm/Melbourne’s Arc One Gallery last year, it was like an acid flashback.
For her new photo series Flowers and Frolics (2025), the artist set up still-life arrangements in her kitchen studio and photographed their fugitive reflections in rippling Mylar. Solids turned liquid and tabletop horizons bulged. Her benign components—pretty flowers in vases and cute ceramic knickknacks—loomed and retreated, blistered and boiled, doubled and disappeared. Already caricatures, ceramic creatures were further distorted, their features smeared and multiplied. Patterned textiles behind and beneath the objects seemed to index the curvature of space. That the show was sedately installed, regularly spaced, only emphasised the mayhem. It was like looking through a set of portholes onto a parallel, errant, topsy-turvy world—heaving, drunken, seasick. As much as I might revel in the distortions, I also wanted to mentally undo the Mylar effect, to reverse engineer it in my head, restoring order.
Redgate is generally seen as a conceptual artist. Her photo series often seem cool and concept led. However, many of her images emerge in lightbulb moments while playing with objects and mirrors, space and light, and exploring the parameters of her large-format camera. Thegimmicky effects in Flowers and Frolics could have only come about through studio experiments, with the complex distortions generated in the Mylar being impossible to plan, previsualise, or replicate. Where still lifes are generally domestic and reassuring, stationary and sedate, these ones ran off in all directions, troubling the gaze and offending our habits of seeing, like Cézanne apples on speed. The Flowers and Frolics works were unruly, hard to categorise. Were they ultimately serious or silly, disruptive or daffy, avant-garde or kitsch? What did Redgate intend? And were they a good next move for her?
Invented by Dupont in the 1950s, Mylar (or biaxially oriented polyethylene terephthalate) is a high-tech, reflective polyester film used in spacecraft insulation and scientific instruments. Photographers, gaffers, and set decorators have also exploited its fluid reflective qualities. Redgate first used it in her photo Fold (Mylar Mirror) (2016), where still-life objects—including hats and bows, striped paper plates and coloured sponges, organised on a black background on the right—are reflected in Mylar on the left. It offered a Rorschach-blot exercise in depth perception, in distinguishing the real from the reflected.
Redgate began engaging with Mylar more thoroughly in her photo series Hypnagogia with Mirrors (2023). Between 1998 and 2023, she created Unfolding Solids, a suite of sculptures: 3D models of 4D forms that seemed to mirror themselves. Those forms had been imagined by mathematicians Irving Stringham, Claude Bragdon, and Alicia Boole Stott. Conveniently, they already resembled classic modernist-minimalist sculptures. For Hypnagogia, Redgate photographed them isolated against black backgrounds, floating, with no visible means of support, reflected in Mylar, turning their geometries organic, reminding me of replicating cells under a microscope. Hypnagogia sandwiched two different forms of uncanny space: the 4D and the mylar reflection. Redgate’s next series Flowers and Frolics was an about-face in subject matter. If the 4D models epitomised the serious and brainy, the flowers and ornaments epitomised sentimentality, triviality, and humour.
Funhouse mirrors are a familiar trope in literature, movies, and art, warping space and showing the familiar in an unfamiliar light, to comic or horrific effect. Literal distortions quickly become symbolic, metaphorical, suggesting the distortion and disruption of social norms. When I look at Flowers and Frolics, I think of antecedents, ranging from theimpersonal-scientific to the personal-psychosexual. At the scientific end, they recall optics experiments and diagrams explaining ‘curved space’ and ‘spaghettification’. At the psychosexual end, they recall biomorphic surrealists—Grace Pailthorpe and Ithell Colquhoun are Redgate’s current favourites. Also André Kertész, who photographed naked women reflected in distorting mirrors, and Ira Cohen, who photographed counterculture types in a ‘Mylar Chamber’ culminating in his trippy movie Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968).
There are games going on within Flowers and Frolics. But the series also has to be understood as part of a bigger game involving Redgate’s whole oeuvre. Redgate has been exhibiting for decades, building a complex, cross-referenced body of work, operating at intersections of conceptualism, minimalism, and feminism, traversing many media. Where she goes next is often a surprise, her moves perverse. She regularly throws spanners into the works, making new things that derange our sense of older ones, deterritorialising, reterritorialising. Increasingly this has become the subject of her work.
Redgate has a reputation as a serious, smart, pedigreed artist, built on her dispassionate, impersonal works, with their sober inquiry into optics, maths, and other systems, and their conceptual–minimalist aesthetic. However, another Jacky has been in the background threatening to crash the party, to make things personal, psychological. Baby Jacky has always been there, but in the past was easier to ignore. She lingered behind works like Photographer Unknown (1980–3), an archive of found black-and-white snaps that turned out to be of Redgate’s family from the old country, and Untitled (1980–2005), a series of photos of surreal still lifes based on her demented utterances while hospitalised as a possibly traumatised three-year old, which were written down by her mother. Redgate would go on to incorporate other family snaps into her art—her as a naked tot holding a mirror, her as a suburban kid in a Mondrian dress. These biographemes connected her personally to the supposedly impersonal subjects of her celebrated works with mirrors and abstraction. (It would be like Einstein explaining relativity in terms of his childhood traumas.)
Childhood references also popped up in Redgate’s self-curated shows. For instance, to accompany her 2005 survey show Life of the System at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gadigal/Sydney, Redgate curated a sidebar show. 1967 presented a selection of abstract works from the Museum’s collection (including op, kinetic, conceptual, and minimalist works) either made or acquired in 1967, the year Redgate arrived in Australia as a child. They were presented alongside her childhood documents and mementos, implying a link, but failing to elaborate it, leaving the question hanging. The gap was the point.
While Baby Jacky has always been there, it was only with Redgate’s 2020 Geelong Gallery show Hold On that Adult and Baby enjoyed equal time in the same works. Redgate presented a suite of giant photographic prints. Their wallpaper-like backdrops recalled her previous formalist photographic works, while their foregrounds were arrangements of teddy bears and dolls, playing doctors and nurses, among other things. As the Gallery’s website explained, her previously formal compositions had been ‘contaminated’ by these childhood companions, contradicting ‘the Cartesian sobriety of her well-known “impersonal” works’. Baby Jacky was out of the bag.
Redgate’s works were once spoken of in different ways. Those impersonal Adult works required one kind of account, the personal Baby ones another—or none at all! But that’s become harder since Hold On. With Flowers and Frolics, Redgate has made an unanticipated body of work that seems radically new but also demands to be read in terms of her past work. While there are no explicit references to Redgate’s childhood, wayward Baby Jacky is in there somewhere. Redgate toys with us, challenging us to establish an appropriate interpretive frame, to determine how much Adult and Baby are each at work here. Can we find a firm footing, a fix on her and her work—as neither stands still?
Flowers and Frolics is the latest instalment in the hermeneutic high jinks that have become part and parcel of Redgate’s project. But, more than that, it pictures that crisis. The Earth moved.