In fading light at Storm King in upstate New York, one of the largest collections of outdoor sculpture in the world, a virtual Native Tongue stands beside Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Luba. Two bookends mapping human progress and geological time – Luba’s rough sawn cedar and cast bronze figure faces the silk-grained alter ego of an ancient kauri text, in extended reality, an Other I. In the wooded parkland, they made bookends also in abstraction – one fluid yet solid and dripping, the other formal and ephemeral, rising up from the ground.

An-other purpose arose from the 2019 staging. On the Storm King map, of 82 artists in the permanent collection including long-term loans, only fifteen artists were women – 18 percent. The transient companion witnessed another type of presence and absence, became a number to be counted, and in the making, momentarily nudged the proportion of womxn artists closer to 20 percent.

Image: Gatfield, Storm Queen 2020
(Ursula von Rydingsvard, Luba and Native Tongue XR - Storm King NY) 
limited edition photograph

Data: Gatfield, 'Inclusive Monuments' NZ Feminist Art Journal Femisphere Vol 4 2021

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April-May 2021 – In Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland  NZ at Scott Lawrie Gallery: "This impressive exhibition highlights a specially curated selection of artworks, with new sculptures presented alongside key pieces created over two decades of Gill Gatfield's practice. Each sensory work represents a building block in the artist's oeuvre. Combined, the Survey creates a meta narrative about time, humanity and place that is both inquisitive and visionary".

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March 2021. Presented for the first time at Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe in Western Australia, the ancient kauri digital sculpture 'Native Tongue XR' speaks to the fast approaching future of interactive technology – bringing the private world of personal digital devices into a shared experience of public space. Visitors encircle and explore the 3m/10ft. high extended reality sculpture at full scale, and see the rich grain of the heartwood of this giant tree buried in Aotearoa NZ at the end of the last Ice Age. An ephemeral form shaped as the pronoun ‘I’ and numeral One, Native Tongue XR speaks of primacy, spirit figures, and other worlds. It is the alter-ego, an ‘other I’, encouraging human reflection on our connections with ancestors, country, community and environment.

The biennial sculpture exhibition near Perth attracts over 200,000 visitors, and in 2021 presents 70 new sculptures by artists from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Denmark, Netherlands, UK, Switzerland, Czechia, Slovakia, USA, Australia and NZ.

Feb 2021. "At the Aotearoa Art Fair, The Snake Charmer raises the bar and acts as a reminder about the magnetic pull of a work of art as an object and its potency for mystery and imagination. The Snake Charmer is absolutely the right work of art to remind us also about the attraction of an art object as representative of a great idea to be uncovered/discovered, and that this is the pull/attraction of the visitor numbers and the enthusiasm for attending the Art Fair." Dr Warren Feeney, NZ Art Historian and Editor, Art Beat

Feb 2021. New Zealand's international Auckland Aotearoa Art Fair features The Snake Charmer in the inaugral Sculpture Space on the waterfront overlooking the America's Cup yachts and glistening harbour. The granite sculpture embodies the form of the first person, the number One, and the declaratory First. Set within a circular garden of healing native plants based on Rongoā Māori, the sculptural tableau draws audiences in to contemplate and touch. Like a siren or guardian, The Snake Charmer watches over land and sea.

Dec. 2020. International art commission platform CODAworx has recognised NZ artist Gill Gatfield as one of 25 Creative Revolutionaries: ‘exemplary leaders of positive change in the field of commissioned art - to celebrate, to learn from, to set the bar.’ In an online panel 'Welcome to the Creative Revolution!', Gill joins three other Creative Revolutionaries to discuss her multi-media sculpture practice and share strategies and ideas with an audience from across the globe, exploring how to make public art that activates change.

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Sept/Oct 2020. At CODAsummit Virtual 2020 Gill Gatfield presents 'Native Tongue - A Taonga / Treasure', exploring how creative use of digital technology is redefining and expanding the fields of sculpture and public art. In an alchemy of old and new, the artist carved the totemic 3m/10ft high sculpture Native Tongue from a prehistoric wood recovered from a native forest which was buried at the end of the last Ice Age in Aotearoa New Zealand. Seeking to extend the ideas, form and mana of Native Tongue, she created the sculpture's alter-ego using state-of-the-art extended reality tools to realise Native Tongue XR, a spirit figure that can travel the world.

Drawing its audience inside the frame, a new archival photograph Glass Ceiling describes an undulating field pulsing with imagination. Beneath the neo-classical arches of the towering Silo, a crystalline pool of acquamarine glass evokes a broken metaphor and a sublime scene. The once-was glass ceiling is smashed and silo-ed: set apart and isolated, prised open for inspection. Focus shifts from an invisible obstacle above to the now palpable sum of its parts. Like an ancient Roman Forum, Glass Ceiling frames space for discussion and the exchange of ideas; a beautiful sensory 'room' for meditation and healing, and a salient reminder of the forces of gravity and unbridled power. An industrial scale monument, it proposes a memorial to the past and a foundation for the future, with higher goals.

Presented: SCAPE Public Art - Art in Residence 2020 Details

July 2020. A new public artwork for Sydney, Asterisk (from the Ancient Greek 'asteriskos': little star) combines ancient stones with celestial form, marking journeys past and present. The 12 tonne sculpture is sited at the entrance of a new park developed by NSW Government and Westconnex on 18 hectares of open space, part of a major transport infrastructure project on Cadigal and Kameygal land. The intersecting stone from different corners of Australia - Pilbara, Chillagoe and Sydney, trace the history of the oldest continent on Earth. A unique composite blade made from rock recovered from road tunnelling below the site orientates the star-form to Ginan, a small star recently internationally recognised by its ancient Aboriginal Australian astronomy star-name. Shadows mark the passage of time in a circle of heritage stones from the Triassic period, which once lined local roads.

Asterisk 2020
Pilbara Marble, Chillagoe Marble, Sydney Tunnel-Stone, Heritage Sandstone
12m Dia. x 1mH.
Westconnext Public Art Project, St Peter's Sydney NSW

April 2020. WomanMade Gallery Chicago presents a curated virtual exhibtion, aptly titled 'Touch' during a global pandemic lock-down. Zealandia (At Home) joins selected international multimedia works each navigating the pyschology of human need for connection with nature, community and aspiration in times of turmoil.

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