Tenfold • Anna Gillespie

Anna Gillespie

Anna Gillespie’s figurative sculptures and drawings in explore the fugitive thoughts and feelings of human experience held in common across political boundaries.

In these figures three worlds collide: There is the world the ‘unnamed’ human present in news broadcasts from around the globe. There is the world of the model, whose life situation and feelings are reflected in the pose they adopt. And finally there is the personal world of the artist, seeping into the work through a sense of communality and shared experience with both the ‘unknown’ people of the world and the friends who agree to model. The parallels between political realities and the subtleties of individual feelings and psychological states emerge as an important theme of the work.

The traditional sculptor’s alchemy of transforming ‘base’ materials into compelling life-forms, is a clear influence on the work. However, the materials used are not traditional: masking tape, a simple and practical studio tool, has become mass, skin, cloth and binding. The contrast between the actual weight of the sculptural installations and the weight implied by the representation of a human body also contradicts sculptural tradition, while at the same time aiming to convey feelings of impermanence and vulnerability.

The works do not attempt to capture movement, but rather still moments.

The inherent inertia in sculpture, a sense of monolith, is seen in the often pillar or column like stance of many of the figures. The figures also seem somehow unable to move – they are captive literally, within their situation be it political or personal, and somehow even within the forms of their own bodies and by the very material from which they are made.

Silent, still and monochrome, these works stand in deliberate contrast to the way the body is depicted in the commercial images that dominate our everyday world. The very act of modelling the figures by a process of hand and eye contrasts with the mechanically produced materials used and the decline of the human scale in our world.

Emotional rather than conceptual forces drive this work which is a form of physical thinking, reflecting on and reminding us of the basic collective condition of being primarily embodied. Unlike much contemporary work dealing with the figure, however, the body in this work is neither deconstructed nor problematised. Rather the body takes on the humanistic role of containing the psyche and emotions.