Liberties – Reflecting on 40 years since the Sex Discrimination Act

Collyer Bristow Gallery  Curated by Day+Gluckman

2 JULY – 21 OCTOBER 2015  Private view 1st July, 2015

Guler Ates, Helen Barff, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Jemima Burrill, Helen Chadwick, Sarah Duffy, Rose English, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Alison Gill, Helena Goldwater, Joy Gregory, Margaret Harrison, Alexis Hunter, Frances Kearney, EJ Major, Eleanor Moreton, Hayley Newman, Freddie Robins, Monica Ross, Jo Spence, Jessica Voorsanger, Alice May Williams and Carey Young

Works by over 20 women artists will reflect the changes in art practice within the context of sexual and gender equality since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK. Some artists confront issues that galvanised the change in law whilst others carved their own place in a complex and male dominated art world. From the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, the politics of the 80s, the boom of lad culture in the 1990s to the current fourth wave of feminism, encouraged largely through and because of social media, all of the artists’ question equality and identity in very different ways.

The exhibition presents a snapshot of the evolving conversations that continue to contribute to the mapping of a woman’s place in British society.  Body, femininity, sex, motherhood, economic and political status are explored through film, photography, sculpture, performance and painting.  

USA Entanglement Tour – ArtCenter/South Florida

Matter: The Fundamental Particles

ArtCenter/South Florida, 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL 33139

For this Art@CMS exhibition, Alison Gill’s Grain of a Universe (Lithic N 39° 07.142′ W 086° 47.045′ /Ferric N 25°47.42556′ W 080° 08.28708′) was selected from artist/scientist collaborations as well as video artists who were invited to create pieces inspired by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment.

The CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. CERN is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. It operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter—the fundamental particles—that provide insights into the fundamental laws of nature. CMS is designed to measure the properties of previously discovered particles with unprecedented precision, and be on the lookout for completely new, unpredicted phenomena.

Action at a Distance (the Leap) (2015)

Action at a Distance (the Leap) (2015)

Steel, aluminium, Jesmonite, neodymium magnets, gold leaf

65 x 94 x 44 cm

Action at a Distance (the Leap) 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)

O-scope (Spooky and Wild) (2015)

Steel, copper, gold plated detector wire, thread, neodymium magnets, wood

74.5 x 60 x 55 cm

O-scope (Spooky and Wild) is a rotating sculpture 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.

USA Entanglement Tour – Fermilab Gallery, Chicago

Grain of a Universe (Lithic N 39° 07.142′ W 086° 47.045′ /Ferric N 41° 50.34066’ W 88° 1.799527’), 2014/15

Exhibited presented by Art@CMS CERN at Fermilab Gallery, Chicago. Fermilab is America’s premier particle physics laboratory.

Lithic, a sandstone mineral rock, marks a point of the trail on The Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum, Indiana USA. Ferric, a magnetic iron cast of the rock sits beside it, one and the same form. For the exhibition at Fermilab Ferric moves to Chicago, while Lithic will remain in Indiana marking a point on the Trail. The ferric cast (iron) magnetic rock, a compass back to the point of it’s origin, a lodestone* of sorts, is geographically dislocated from its point of creation; Ferric in orbit of Lithic, a permanent motion and entanglement between the two rocks.

Grain of a Universe (Lithic N 39° 07.142′ W 086° 47.045′ /Ferric N 41° 50.34066’W 88° 1.799527’), suggests a material or metaphysical fragment with it’s origins and future part of an ongoing cosmological odyssey, a strange (and fearful) symmetry. Time and sun, rain, snow and ice will act upon the two forms differently, drawing each into a process of entropic transformation.

*Lodestones are highly magnetic rocks of iron ore, that naturally attract pieces of iron with their magnetic properties and align themselves with the north/south axis of the earth. They were used by early (spiritual and geographical) navigators to make compasses. The name lodestone, in Middle English means ‘course stone’ or ‘leading stone’.

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.

Stranger Than Paradise and Her Majesty the Queen of Belgium

The 60th Anniversary of CERN – Science for Peace – Art and Science exhibition, Academy Palace, Brussels featured sculpture by Alison Gill presented by Art@CMS CERN.

Sense of Universe at the Earth & Man Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria

Alison Gill invited by Art@CMS to participate in the Art and Science Symposium SENSE of UNIVERSE in Sofia / Bulgaria exhibiting sculptures produced during 2013 while working as Research Artist at CMS CERN

Alison Gill exhibits at The Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates /seconds

Sharjah Art Foundation, Building I, SAF Art Spaces

Exhibition: /seconds.  11.10.14 – 10.12.14

Curated by Peter Lewis, /seconds. presents a selection of artists’ works from the online journal of the same title (2004-2014), which covers a broad range of issues and art practices from different cultural perspectives. A small selection of artists including original works by Alison Gill and commissioned digital posters.

The project was initiated in 2004 and has invited over 1500 artists and writers to contribute over the years. The exhibition features key contributions from the ten year period of the project, works on display include installations, interactive performance, video, photography and commissioned posters.

Everything Matrix (2014)

Everything Matrix (2014)

Paper (backed with scrim), gesso, indigo dye, ink, gold leaf

200 cm x 200 cm

If it were possible answer every question about the future or discover the root of all uncertainties, would there not be more questions beyond these?

In this philosophical drawing device, an image of a folding cosmos, a sort of magic square/time machine/fortune teller, has been created as a focus for contemplation (of everything actual and imaginable). Indigo pigment has been used to reference the tradition in art of a prescient power that seeks to illuminate what cannot yet be seen or fully understood.