Although better known for her work exhibited in galleries and museums, Alison Gill has had much experience of involvement with projects and events beyond the conventional white cube spaces of contemporary art and welcomes the challenge and imaginative possibilities of responding to particular social contexts, audiences and environments. An example being a temporary intervention at (the former) Chiltern Sculpture Park: The In-between which was also accompanied by a web project titled Follow The Trail. Projects / Events include works in public rural and urban spaces; the London Underground; exhibiting in an empty unit the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre; producing a drawing blog and performative collaborations at artist led frivolities including Joshua Compston’s Fete Worse than Death, Gavin Turk’s Livestock Market and Articultural Show on the Southbank, Deborah Curtis’s The House of Fairytales; Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor Salon, Bridget Nicholls’s and Mark Pilkington’s First International Arts Pestival. Other events have included Back-shop Salon, a series of evening events including a collaboration with poet Tamar Yoseloff, events were organised by Alison Gill to coincide with her exhibition Legend Trip, 2012 which explored contemporary folklore and other themes within Gill’s work on show at Charlie Dutton Gallery.
The most recent projects include a site specific sculpture Grain of a Universe (Lithic/Ferric), 2014, made in situ at The Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum, Indiana USA, produced in their workshop and foundry. In an ongoing partnership with Art@CMS, the sculpture Stranger Than Paradiseq, made as the Research Artist for CMS CERN 2013 was recently exhibited at the 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Valencia in the Palacio De Congresos De Valencia, Spain.
Iain Nicholls lives and works in Darfield South Yorkshire. Between 1994 and 2005 Iain worked full time and freelance making and designing computer games in the UK and California. Although never stopping during this time, Iain returned to painting full time in 2007. Since then he has received two Arts Council Grants since to paint the landscape where he lives and has also made a book of poems and pictures with his friend and fellow Darfielder, the poet and broadcaster Ian McMilan. In 2014 his work was included in Charles Williams RWS book “Basic Watercolour”, he was artist in residence at The Lookout Tower Aldeburgh and had three solo shows in London, Barnsley and Dublin.
He says of his work, ‘Subject needs meaning and depth and so far the last few years I have been drawn to my day to day life and surroundings in Yorkshire. It’s as good a starting point as any as my paintings are also about me being able to use my imagination, enjoying the freedom to see where a painting can take me. I see making a painting a bit like doing an experiment, and my ideal state to be in when painting is one of playing – whether its with form, colour, the initial subject, the medium, or how all these things might relate to each other.’
