Amplifier (1997)

Amplifier (1997)

Paper, PVA, paint, steel armature
(11 parts, Liberty Cap/Magic Mushrooms)
Dimensions variable (height 300 cm)

Private collection. Exhibited at Jerwood Gallery, London 1999 and Sabine Wachters Fine Arts, Brussels 1998

‘Spatial relationships experienced at an early age are impressions that are brought with you into adulthood. These impressions serve to ground perception in later life, which can, when reencountered, in some way induce a sense of the uncanny. The sense of being overwhelmed by spatial relations and childhood fantasy are devices used by Gill in her second sculpture, Amplifier 1997. Larger than life, eleven papier mache magic mushrooms, in differing proportions, are clustered together to form a troop. The psilocybe semilanceata has hallucinogenic properties when consumed. Each is carefully reproduced, the hue and spores exact, lightly glazed to affect the dewy mist-ridden atmosphere of the forest. The fragility of these things induces a hallucinatory haze, where their conceptual whereabouts conflict with the nature of fabrication. The materiality is in a sense completely ordinary, it is paper, transformed paper, paper meshed together and moulded and carved. Historically, this material has always been a source for complex object making, and especially object making of the most imaginary kind, speaking of deviation, of transformation into a paper dream. These fungi also happen to be called Liberty Cap, recognising the power of naming, and opening up further possibilities for the imagination. That there are endless potential narratives then seems the point of visual culture. That is its role as arbiter, jammed between these worlds of our inner consciousness, imagination, and the domain we inhabit.

In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin writes “…one can go on to ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way.” Perhaps not solid, nor unique, but it is one of the ways in which contemporary art works at its best, that is, as a set of prompts that allow the freedom to create individual and collective narrative.’

Lisa Panting