International award-winning sculptor Gill Gatfield transforms ancient and unique materials into minimalist forms. Her artworks reach into sentient and sensory realms, and connect people, environment and place. Probing cultural and political philosophies, the work sparks conversations, imagining liminal borders, ancestral origins, decolonised systems and free exchange. In an inventive practice, digital, ephemeral and analogue media are deployed within critical and conceptual frameworks, building further expression and meaning from totemic first-forms.

 

Conceived in parallel for VR and analogue, Gatfield’s crystal-glass sculpture The Bell Jar conjures the sublime. Referencing Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, the dream-like composition digs into unpredictable and unknowable states of being and mind. In perfect harmony, translucent twin I-forms curve in a classical arch that is incomplete yet enclosing, a circle of self-reference defined by air. The balletic figures lean in as if longing for connection but cannot touch. They bend to the point of breaking and are suspended in time. From outside and within, the glass-cage glistens and seduces, locking audiences in a grid of swirling I-shadows as the sun and moon track across a cloud-less sky.