Love is on its way
Press for three new sculptures made in 2015 exhibited at LOVE, Gate House Gallery, Guernsey by Shaun Shakleton at Guernsey Press.
Alison Gill’s new sculptures for the exhibition ‘LOVE’, invites us to consider romantic vision and what is revealed by human need to look into the very fabric of the universe, simultaneously looking forward in time and back to the beginnings of the cosmos. Love, like the recent discovery of Higgs Boson or the continuing search for dark matter and dark energy, is hard to find and and yet no less desirable.
Action at a Distance (the Leap), (2015), represents a phenomenon known to quantum theory and also lovers. The sculpture consists of a pair of steel frames reminiscent of Giacometti’s early Surrealist works, placed apart. Attached to the frames and crossing the boundary, are metallic fluid forms held together and kept apart by the magnetic field. It is a meditation on ideas of invisible things embedded within philosophical questions of what connects us, binds us together and fills ‘emptiness’ with matter.
O-scope (Spooky and Wild), (2015), this rotating sculpture is made in steel, using magnets and detector wire from the CMS detector at CERN. It is concerned with the difficulty of entering spaces and other dimensions that cannot be seen and are difficult to conceive. The hole at the centre of the sculpture marks a journey that cannot be taken. The sculpture uses magnets like the ones in the collider’s experiments, their opposing forces signifying the difficulty of entering this world, no matter how appealing. It represents an opening into the realm of possibility, which will forever be open to the mind to explore but closed to experience. Wire thread, woven through the space of the piece in a mathematical thirteen-point pattern, is known as a mystic rose.
Entanglement Attractor, (2015) takes a Mobius strip, links it with another Mobius strip, the famous puzzling mathematical continuous surface, and laser cuts each surface with hexagonal shapes. The piece investigates the knotty conditions of transformations, through time and space and a process involving fire, cutting, bending, collision and magnetic attraction.
The new sculptures create a space for curiosity and for imagination to evolve. Like the ‘Eureka’ moment or the ‘Freudian slip’ Gill’s work allows us to experience what is hidden, but not unknowable. In Gill’s art the unconscious speaks. Gill continues to push these boundaries by presenting new sculpture related to the birth of stars and love, ideas of ‘endless’, eternal union and doorways into a space where everything is connected.