Sculpture & Installation
Regeneration
I created Regeneration by welding scrap tubular steel. The shape and scale resemble a foetal form or an enlarged cell, like a line drawing in space. It reproduces then disappears earthwards to emerge elsewhere and begin the cycle again.
Regeneration, 2012, powder-coated steel, 110 × 130 × 80cm
Land and Time: Solid
The cylinder shape, used by excavators to take core samples of the earth, by curators to hold specimens in solution or gel, is used here to suspend the world below the surface of the farm land on which Gigi lives. The early land map now in tracing paper, describes volume via the ephemeral and the translucent. These sculptures look at what connects us – time past to time present. Land connects us and yet it is not immediately apparent. Themes of transition, shift, movement and displacement are central to Gigi’s connection to land. Solidity and containment on the one hand, elusive impressions and lightness of materials on the other.
Solid, 2015, mixed media
Land and Time: Air
This cylinder contains the Belemnites, ancient fossil remains of squid which Gigi finds throughout the exposed soils on the farm. Found objects are woven in clusters to suggest the haphazard nature in which the squid fell and then trapped in layers of sediment. Although these creatures could only have lived in the ancient sea, by suspending them in air, this sculpture brings to us an imagined world – were ancient time to have travelled forward to meet us.
Air, 2015, mixed media
Drawing Machine
Drawing Machine records the presence of people as gestural marks on paper using conté crayon. The mechanism is constructed from found objects combined to create a machine that is activated only when pushed or pulled by the audience, transmitting their energy and mood. The resulting drawing becomes a collaboration revealing what it is to gather and to be human. Each component is derived from instruments that civilisation has created to measure our relationship to the world: weight, load, compression, suspension, swing, time, frequency, vibration and rhythm, akin to Hooke's Law.
“The lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep.” Robert Macfarlane
Click here to view a short film of the Drawing Machine: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1168489175
Drawing Machine, 2015, mixed media
Drawing Machine (2018 install & process view at 'Human', German Residence, London)
Drawing Machine Drawing I, 2018, Crayon on Paper, 94 x 94cm
Drawing Machine Drawing II, 2018, Crayon on Paper, 94 x 94cm
Drawing Machine Drawing III, 2018, Crayon on Paper, 94 x 94cm
Drove Road Shroud
This installation is a record of commonly used places and spaces that formed part of the daily experience of the people who inhabited them. Gigi has made impressions using linen sheets and Icelandic volcanic ash from Landmannalaugar as pigment. These Shrouds are acts of collective memory of windows, dry-stone walls, ancient and well-trodden flagstone floors, and old barns. The Shroud shown here is called Drove Road, Dorset. Drove roads are ancient routes along which drovers moved livestock between fields, villages, towns and markets. These paths connected people to places, forming an arterial network throughout Britain. This drove road has been worn down to its bedrock through the passage of countless people. The sculpture seeks to convey the sense of loss and the fleeting nature of any impression we leave behind.
Robert Macfarlane wrote: “paths were imprinted with the ‘dreams’ of each traveller who had walked it and that his own experiences would in course of time [also] lie under men’s feet.”
Drove Road Shroud, 2018, found object, wood, fabric cotton bedsheet and soil pigment, 216.x4 x 125.7cm
Manna From Heaven
The pizza box is a symbol of our age of convenience. Quickly ordered and delivered to ones door, the pizza is now a template on which many cultures are able to impose their palate. Manna from Heavenis a sculpture and interactive puzzle seen from a bird’s eye view. It asks what type of future we could taste. Manna – Bread was given by God every morning to the Israelites on their exodus from Egypt to Sinai. It had to be eaten on the day otherwise it would rot. This prevented hoarding and greed for personal gain.
The idea for ‘Manna from Heaven’ is based on the juxtaposition between convenience and rigour. It signifies the contrast between what we have become used to in our daily life and what has increasingly come under threat: the time for contemplation, discussion between people about the nature of existence, the puzzle of life. The inspiration for this piece comes from a cross Gigi saw in Northern Scotland, which was a Christian slab cross, uncovered in the 20th century. It had been incised in the early Medieval era and was the used as part of a deep grave.
This puzzle sculpture plays on the premise that the negative space is as important as the positive. In one space, a conversation takes place by four figures that we see from above when we open the lid of the pizza box. These figures with abstracted heads and bodies converge and are inclined in serious deliberation. They occupy the negative space around an early Medieval Christian cross. Their ‘heads’ notch into the cross – the positive permanent symbol of Christianity. It is as though they hold up the cross and complete the space. The heads resemble question marks. Christianity is a puzzle that offers, for some, a way of managing temporal life. For others, it has yet to be discovered. Religion forces us to ask questions about our lives and the nature of our existence.
Gigi’s puzzle within a pizza box replicates the indented corners at the right angles of the cross, which appeared to her like puzzle heads. The ‘heads’ ponder this puzzle as well as constitute it. Are these ordinary folk? The Evangelists? The Apostles? Are they receiving the Manna, succour from their faith? Gigi’s oak cross, and the four heads surrounding it, support one another, creating an image of interdependence. The idea being that the cross, and by extension Christianity itself, creates the foundations on which people can hold discussions and come together.
Manna From Heaven, 2017, oak, paint & cardboard
Installation View, 2015