Light playing with form

Echo Chamber, 1974

Innerlight, 1972

Macho The Cock, 1982

TAO, 1965

Titania, 1990

"Sorel was born in Hungary in 1935, into what would have been considered as a dangerously intellectual middle class family. The war saw them persecuted by the Nazis while, under a Stalinist regime, a grandmother living in former Yugoslavia and an aunt in capitalist West provided further ground for discrimination. (...) The rudiments of printmaking were learnt at a lycee school in Budapest, though it was under the aegis of studying stage design that Sorel first entered the Academy of Applied Arts. Strings were pulled to secure a move to the Institute of Fine Arts, but the dominant creed of the time, kitsch social realism, failed to impress and was fiercely resisted. (...)


In 1956 Revolution saw Sorel and her mother move to England, settling in London, where she enrolled as an illustration student at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. There she encountered a mixture of liberation and entrenchment (...).


"We took weeks to work on a plate, layering one technique over the other. We were encouraged to adopt an almost schizophrenic approach, alternating between the creative and the critical frame of mind (...)"


Unlike contemporaries who were drawn to the mechanics of the kinetic, Sorel has preffered not to make use of electrical devices. Rather she concentrates on employing the simplest of spot lights to highlight the projections of her chosen materials. The flamboyance that makes up Macho the Cock comes from engraved and welded lines working in tandem with the outward projections of a shadow, a heightened display of colour and the actual time spent by the viewer following and moving around these sculptural lines. In her own words: "The movement comes from solid objects which have a line or lines scored or engraved into their surface. When you start walking around, the lines strengthened by the optical properties of the material, also start moving." The inclusion of real (side) mirrors attached to flat projected shapes only adds to the possibilities for imaginative interaction with the sculpture."


Sorel, Agathe (2004) Agathe Sorel, projections in space and time, 1st edition, Bradford, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery