Disappear To Instinct (2009)
Iron casts, steel, painted plaster, aluminium, plastic sheath, bee’s wax, glass beads
7 parts, dimensions variable, average high 200 cm
Installation view: Brink (2009), Sabine Wachters Fine Arts, Brussels, (private collection)
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. Disappear To Instinct 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.