SIGNE JAIS

A set of points swept by a moving straight line

February 10 - March 18, 2023

Klik her for tekst på Dansk

See full list of works here

SPECTA opens the exhibition A Set of Points Swept By a Moving Straight Line with new works by Signe Jais. The title of the exhibition is taken from mathematics, which is the focal point of the works. Plane, facade, section becomes cone, cylinder, hyperboloid in a series of both clear and dizzying figures, drawn in sewing thread over educational boards and checkered papers.

In the latter part of the 1930s, the British visual artist Henry Moore produced a series of sculptures that were based on the 19th-century breakthroughs in descriptive geometry:

 The great French mathematician Gaspard Monge (1746 – 1818) invented what came to be called descriptive geometry and illustrated his discoveries using surfaces created by stretching strings across a curved frame. In mathematics these are called ruled surfaces because through every point there is at least one, sometimes more than one, straight line which lies on the surface. Cones and cylinders are obvious examples but there are many others. (…)

John Toland FRS i katalog til Intersections Henry Moore and stringed surfaces
4 april - 20. Juni 2012 på The Royal Society i London

Moore stated on several occasions that the use of string in his sculpture, which began in 1937, was influenced by seeing models at the Science Museum in London: "I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side…Through these holes rings were threaded and lead to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle…It wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other which excited me.”"(…)

Hedgecoe, J. and Moore, H (1968).
Henry Spencer Moore. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 105.

This is also a starting point for Signe Jais' new works. In a series of works with sewing thread on older technical educational boards, mathematics and art meet, and a new, visual expression emerges, an expression that wedges itself into the spaces between the three. Or perhaps as a glue that binds them together, sometimes tightly and firm, at other times as figures that are in motion. In the same way, the combination of scientific mathematics and art is in a kind of movement towards something third, where the abstraction that characterizes both mathematics and the visual arts unites them.

Space in between places, e.g. in architecture, has long been a recurring theme in Signe Jais's works, where, as an example, clippings of images of suburban architecture from the 1960s have represented the space between city and country. For the exhibition, Jais has created a series of new works with physical, actual spaces, as sewing thread spans a "void" between two parts. It gives resilience and a focus on both the space and the points that connect.

Overall, one can say that Signe Jais "translates" the mathematical models into two-dimensional drawings, both in a direct translation and in a slightly 'freestyled' translation. The thread gives the works both tactility and spatiality and allows the works to also point back to the original models.

Signe Jais (DK, 1967) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and she has a large number of exhibitions behind her, and she is represented in several collections, e.g. The Norwegian Arts Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, NOVO Nordisk and Copenhagen Municipality.

A big thank you goes to museum-inspector at Museum Sønderjylland, Jens Tang Kristensen, who has written an in-depth text for the exhibition.