Alison Gill
Regenerator (Utopia n)
Regenerator (Utopia n)
Title: Regenerator (Utopia n)
Date: 2015
Medium: Wire, polymer clay, metallisation, varnish
Artist: Alison Gill
Exhibition: Group Portrait with Garden, 2018
From press release:
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; to speculate is after all a creative act of imagination and ‘dreams are made of this’.
From artist:
Regenerator (Utopia n) is a wire sculpture, each of its two parts resembling a tumbleweed. The structural branching forms have been metalised with ‘fool’s gold’ in a vacuum chamber – generating a futuristic, cartoon nature and science fiction effect depending on proximity and location.
Think of tumbleweeds and they conjure up images of Western films, desolate locations, abandoned gold rush towns, tragic-comic emptiness and silence, even a ghosting meme. Tumbleweeds often appear where everything else has gone; the place is wiped out (i.e. nothing left but tumbleweed). If regeneration seems to kill a place, then Regenerator (Utopia n) offers something potentially more hopeful. In its first iteration, I took the two tumbleweeds for a walk between various locations during the Deptford X festival (2015). I was interested in having a conversation about local development, regeneration, and the speculators attracted to the area. You only need to visit Deptford to see how that has gone. Regenerator (Utopia n) continues to pop up in unexpected places, though, just as it did in a Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project, shape-shifting an alternative. It conjures with 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 from ‘Take Me I’m Yours’). Regenerator (Utopia n) is less a sculpture then, and more of a nomadic catalyst for action, movement, dancing and conversation, living up to the name.
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