Alison Gill’s sculpture at the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics, Valencia

2 – 9 July 2014

Alison Gill, Stranger Than Paradise (Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Magic Bean, Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Thumb) (2013)

Steel, plaster, cement, Carrara marble dust, neodymium magnets, string

6 parts, Installation size variable

Art@CMS* presents sculpture Stranger Than Paradise (2013), by Alison Gill at the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Valencia, Spain (Palacio De Congresos De Valencia). 

“What I recall most about making the sculpture, Stranger Than Paradise, is the sense of wonder and awe I felt after visiting the world’s largest science experiments at CERN during 2012/13. I wanted to represent that union in some way. Stranger Than Paradise is a sculpture in six parts. It uses the force of magnetism and gravity and is also inspired by quarks in the Standard Model. Each part derives a name from a different fairy tale: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Magic Bean, Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin and Tom Thumb. The power of naming is used to evoke stories of magical and transformative properties. The hanging and levitating, primitive and embryonic sculptural forms are suggestive of giant particles and related phenomena but remain, to a degree, uncertain and unknowable, experienced differently by each observer. The sculpture, Stranger Than Paradisebecomes a way to grasp the mystery of unseen dimensions. The more you look, the more you begin to see.”

Alison Gill, June 2014

*Art@CMS is a public engagement initiative of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator atCERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

y 2nd till 9th 2014

  Alison Gill created the works with the participation of physicist Ian Shipsey