Peter Sedgley

From 1948 to 1950 he completed national service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) in Egypt.

He had to teach me geometry so that I could make the things I knew ought to be.”[10] In the mid-1960s Sedgley and Riley taught at Byam Shaw Art School, Kensington where one of his students was James Dyson.

About Sedgley and Riley, Dyson said, “From them I learnt how to see and understand form, and ultimately how to draw it.”[11] In 1966 the Canadian art dealer, Jack Pollock took some of Sedgley's pieces, together with those by David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Riley, to exhibit in his gallery in Canada, about which he wrote, “I realized that a show of this work in Canada could have a tremendous impression, not just on buyers, but on artists.

[14] This experimentation led ultimately toe Sedgley's creation of art using artificial light.

[19] He considered his work “‘international’ in spirit.”[20] In Germany, Sedgley was “mostly concerned with the use of electric light and kinetic sculpture.”[21] His first permanent installation was “Night and Day”, at Hermann Ehlers Platz Steglitz in 1974.

Riley said “Peter wanted to build a geodesic dome in the house, and he did it,” however, it was “a tight squeeze”.

The need for somewhere to physically store this information led to the idea of a location that would house both AIR and artist studios.

[31] In November 1969, Sedgley became a founding member of the Systems Group which also included Richard Allen, Peter Loew, Jean Spencer and Gillian Wise.

They “developed canvases and constructions organised in arrangements free from painterly 'accident', subjective sensation or emotion, exhibiting regular constants and variables.”[32] Together with Bruce Lacey, John Latham and others, he created a group called Whscht (how one might spell the sound of a whistle) which staged ‘happenings’ that were designed to provoke a response from the person in the street.