Alison Gill

Sabine Watchers Fine Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition by British artist Alison Gill. Brink, Gill’s third solo show with the gallery, includes sculpture, drawing and etching made between 2005 and 2009.

Gill’s work operates in the realm of the imaginary, yet registers the environment we inhabit, saturated as it is with stories of war, global terrorism and ecological collapse. Her current work addresses the ways in which mediated images of extreme trauma enter collective consciousness. These works acknowledge the tropes of Modernism associated with ‘The Geometry of Fear’: Herbert Read’s term coined for the group of British Artists exhibiting in the post war 1952 Venice Biennale. Now the modernist enterprise is itself in crisis, Gill recovers the pathos of that historical moment, informed, as it was by contemporary events yet prescient of a future loss.

With Gill, all manner of materials are utilized; manufactured objects are processed and salvaged elements are built into assemblages. Parts are modeled, then cast and recast, passing through uncomfortable – even brutal, states of change. In spite of this, there is playfulness that seeps out from Gill’s intricate hand-made forms. Iron casts of knees with open wounds encrusted with pewter maggots balance on a small battered wooden box. Treatment conflates the sculptural iconography of the crucifix with the image of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and that of war trauma and healing. This is a reference to the maggot poultices used on First World War victims recovering from No Man’s Land. In contrast, Prop infantilises and corrupts Minimalist strategies with almost cartoon horror. A mangled inverted iron cast of a teddy bear is skewered by a steel pole and balanced against the wall. It is held in place by the forces of gravity and the weight of the steel slab placed diagonally adjacent on the floor.

In Brink, Gill registers the sense of loss, violence and nostalgia we feel for nature, history and conflict. Although it describes a precarious or traumatic state, it simultaneously dares to toy with aspirations of hope, healing and freedom. The seductive and savage materiality of these works also acknowledges ambivalence towards the spectacle of violence. She presents an oscillation between attraction and repulsion and apprehends identification and the shifting balance of power between that of the victim, the persecutor, the witness and viewer of the work.

Alison Gill was born in London and studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. She has shown widely in the UK and internationally including Taro Nasu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; In the Society of London Ladies, Dispari & Dispari Project, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Space to Draw, The Jerwood Space, London; Dream Machines, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; Camden Arts Centre, London; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea.

For further information and artwork material, please contact:
Sabine Wachters Fine Arts Brussels
Open Thursday - Friday, 11am-1pm / 2pm-4pm or by appointment.
Avenue de Stalingradlaan 26
1000, Brussels
Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)50.61.58.35
Tel: +32 (0)485.206.494
Email: s.wachters.finearts@skynet.be
www.sabinewachters.com