Transporter (1999)

Transporter (1999)

Card, pva glue, cellulose paint, steel engineering

Hight 500 cm

(Private collection)

 ‘That Alison Gill has always been curious about altered states of mind, the fantastical, and the imagination, is apparent on the first viewing of her work. Her visual language and method of making completely serve this enquiry. There is an inherent quality to the works on view, a hand made but intricate level of production which is in some way reminiscent of prop-making, where props assist in the creation of the story. Unlike props, though, they function more as complex stages in their own right, and rather than completing a scene or narrative these works totally initiate the experience to which you become bound. Unlike the delusion intrinsic in prop-making there is an impression of exposure as the materiality of the works deliberately reveals itself. 

“Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.” So comments Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, first published in 1963. This text based on the experience of taking mescaline, had great influence on the popular imagination. During this era drug culture had a major impact on the general perception of, and desire for, altered states of mind. It was as if the body could now achieve some kind of actual spatial transference. Visual culture as a whole absorbed these tenets and changed the landscape of language forever. 

Transporter 1999 by Gill is a five-metre high golden staircase that operates as part of this discourse, acting as a route to another plane of consciousness. The doubtful nature of this possibility is manifest in the structure itself, as the complexity of its engineering would seem to undermine this quest. Its construction was achieved by laser- cutting each layer, then meticulously gluing these pieces together, resulting in a seemingly solid object of cardboard. The nature of ascent into dreamscape, and the impossibility of an actual journey up those stairs, leaves a mental image of a body dashed to the floor; a vision of the toppling structure, the disappearance underfoot, a collapse, the incongruity of the weight of a body on this heavenly gateway. The work grapples with the metaphysical and the infinite, and journeys into the realm of the symbolic where we can exist momentarily before being plummeted back into a world of empirical experience. There is an inherent romanticism in this sensibility, the desire for which seems almost anachronistic in this cynical age. As contemporary experience has increasingly related the use of our imaginary faculty to the back burner, it becomes almost a shock to encounter an artist working so immediately within this trope.’

Lisa Panting