Deptford X 2015 – Regenerator (Utopia n)

Guest Artists for Deptford X, opens 25 September 2015  

Alison Gill has made a new sculpture, Regenerator (Utopia n) for Deptford X: London’s Contemporary Art Festival 2015. It is a wire sculpture, each part resembling tumbleweed. The structural branching forms have been metalized with ‘fool’s gold’ in a vacuum chamber – generating a futuristic, science fiction effect. Think of tumbleweed and it conjures up images of Western films, desolate locations, abandoned gold rush towns or tragic-comic emptiness and silence. Tumbleweed, in visual media, often appears where everything else has gone; the place is wiped out (i.e. nothing left but tumbleweed). If regeneration seems to kill a place, Regenerator (Utopia n) offers something potentially more hopeful. The sculpture will move between various locations during Deptford X aiming to raise questions and conversation about local development, regeneration and speculators attracted to the area. Importantly, the work plays out an alternative, another kind of speculation, one focused less on capital; to speculate is after all a creative act of imagination and ‘dreams are made of this’. *

*Squeeze lyrics

The work will feature at Deptford X Gallery and another venue each day to be announced daily via social media.