‘Gemma Anderson-Tempini is unique among artists who have pursued the concept of a fourth dimension of space during the 20th and 21st centuries. She combines knowledge of advanced theories of both four-dimensional mathematics and string theory in physics—gained through collaborations in various universities—with a practice that brings four-dimensional effects into the everyday world. She has studied irregular four-dimensional polytopes with a mathematician and explored these forms both via a computer programing collaboration and by means of her superb drawing skills, producing beautiful renderings of them using color and pattern. At the same time, her recent exhibition project “And She Build a Crooked House,” installed in the Burton Grange mansion in Leeds, brought a variety of effects associated with the fourth dimension—mirrors, holograms, and a climbing frame modeled on a 3D projection of a 4D polytope—into the experience of the public. In this commitment to “educat[ing] the space sense” of others, she stands in the tradition of the original advocate of four-dimensional experience, hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton in his 1888 A New Era of Thought’.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, MIT Press, 2018
