Rachel Gadsden

About

As part of GV Art's Theatre of the Mind season in conjunction with Elastic Theatre's new multi-media work, Julius. Gadsden's work explores the physical, historical and personal experience that forms the human condition. In 2007 she was appointed the first contemporary artist in Residence at Hampton Court Palace for Historic Royal Palaces. Other site-specific commissions have taken her to a colliery in South Wales, the Houses of Parliament for a 2009 General Election Commission, Khayelitsha Township in South Africa; and also to the now derelict Cane Hill and North Wales Asylum hospitals, where the researched experiences of patients and staff became the subject of the work — including the performance Loanda Matilda Wall, an exploration of the consciousness of a patient of the same name who was temporarily admitted to the hospital in 1876. The histories of all such places, serve for Gadsden as a metaphor for the physical and psychological nature of what it is to be human. Aesthetically rich and layered, the work shown in GV Art's exhibition reveals the breadth and energy of Gadsden's artistic output to date, addressing notions of fragility, survival and hope.