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Gillian Brent

Sheffield
Sculptor and visual artist with a studio practice and an engagement and participatory practice.
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Gillian’s sculpture is rooted in Modernist principles of manipulating form, space and material; she utilises these to address contemporary concerns about the affective power objects have over us, and their intrinsic value.

Gillian constructs sculpture in steel, with additional elements in other materials such as wood, stone, concrete and Jesmonite. She creates spatial and dynamic configurations that synthesise her observations, allude to function and suggest new narratives. Her work process is responsive and organic, using fairly simple techniques to construct sculpture from collections of elements. The space within and around her sculptures becomes activated by the physical materials. Working with balance and gravity is an important of her making process; physical, visual and conceptual.

She has been constructing sculpture using steel rod and sheet for many years. She often use materials which already have a history of being shaped or worked, although she manipulates and forms new materials as well. She has recently begun incorporating found and cast forms and objects into her sculpture to create mass and volume and bring a new focus on subjectivity and shared experience. She often uses discarded domestic objects as sculptural forms, that retain their familiarity yet take on alternative roles in their relation to other materials and to the spatial dynamics of the sculpture. She is interested in how the forms can be repurposed rather than the nostalgia the objects generate, although she isn’t able to control how others see them. She casts some of these objects in Jesmonite, transposing them into a new material to alter their physicality and remove them another step from their history.

In parallel with her studio practice, Gillian works as an artist in a learning and engagement context on arts projects, public commissions and research programmes in partnership with galleries, universities, public and community organisations.

 

 

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