TOWARDS THE TESSARACT, 1978
Watercolour and ink. 6¾ x 6¼in. (17.3 x 16.2cm.)
Signed with the monogram ’78.
Inscribed on the reverse of the frame with the artist’s name, the title of the work, and the year. With the Paul label.
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
The dictionary defines a tessaract as a four dimensional cube or hypercube. Colquhoun introduces spatial and depth ambiguities into the form of the cube by the use of different coloured facets. In other words, using perspective, she has depicted a three dimensional representation on a two dimensional sheet of paper of the three dimensional shadow of a four dimensional object.
For Colquhoun, the hypercube is more likely to be of magical rather than mathematical interest. The fourth dimension can be regarded as the spiritual dimension. Further, in the imaginative creation of a tessaract, the magician can be thought of as visualising the creation of the universe. In one Thelemic lodge, the imaginative and ritual construction of a tessaract was described in twenty-two stages, from point, to line, to cube and finally to hypercube. The twenty-two stages, as usual, were linked to the Tarot trumps and the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life.