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As a mathematician and an artist I am interested in the construction of projections and transformations between two and three dimensions. Of particular interest is the Möbius strip, a 2-dimensional (2-D) surface that twists in 3-dimensional (3-D) space. Margaret Roberts’s drawing, TURN, is a different form of spatial twist. Though always firmly grounded on a 2-D surface, it also spans 3-D space. TURN transforms the showroom of Factory 49, making it feel different by providing visitors with the opportunity to physically enter the space of a drawing. As the artist explains, the walls also transform the drawing by breaking it in one corner and causing it to bend back on itself in one direction, while splaying out on the floor in the other. This is the consequence of what she says is the drawing’s attempt to pivot and turn the right-angled wall-structure, and the wall’s inability to turn along with it. Unlike the clever Möbius strip, the success of the yellow drawing emerges out of its failure to achieve this impossible task.
The artist explains that although this makes the architecture appear inert in comparison with the energetic line, its participation frees the line from the responsibility of representation, instead encouraging its inherent eccentricity. TURN is thus a process-drawing that uses a system that can be made with any architecture. The starting point is arbitrary, but once begun, the interaction of lines with the 3-dimensionality of its subject and ground has a type of inevitability about it. In Factory 49 the template for the drawing is the two rectangular walls (one short, one long) that are constructed at right angles to each other and that normally provide the ‘hanging