VIBRATION

"Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life...Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world." Gaston Bachelard

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Gill Roth's frank, exuberant style is full of kinetic energy. Much of her work is inspired by the shapes children make with their bodies; wild flapping hands of a child running, young bare legs set straight out in front, children caught in the moment of skipping along a road or playing Hopscotch or dancing.

Our adult selves are invited to confront our own memories along with the artist who shows us a funny, joyful childish world, which is vivid and vibrating and juicy (one of Gill's words) and full of the fresh sensations of being alive.

Alongside there are disturbing moments among her emotionally layered dancing, running, sitting figures. Her 'children' seem at times to be floating, un-selfed, encircled in wafts of darkness as they struggle to harness and absorb the powerful current of life and its sensations.

Gill also takes inspiration from her wardrobe in which she recently did an 'artists residency'. Out has come funny, joyful, large pants, small bras, slips and socks and boots as she examines the feeling of wearing clothing. These are clothes often painted in a tone of dirty flesh pink, reminiscent of calamine lotion. Hung on painted hangers or dancing across the surface, they have a life of their own, and take us through the back of the wardrobe where we emerge into a time of fading lost words; hoity-toity, empire-line, naughty-nightie, doilies and lace. Big pants; a repeated image, sourced in Deptford market are roll-ons, dresses are frocks, petticoats are slips. The empty clothes play with our own memories and invite us to imagine the presence of the person who once filled them and their erotic life. It is a wardrobe of clothes on hangers alive and doing their own thing in the dark. Mostly partying.

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