Bert Gilbert MRSS

Bert Gilbert’s multidisciplinary practice uses the narrative and haptic qualities of materials to produce sensory artefacts, installations, sculptures and performances that animate the shadow realms of rapture and taboo.

Informed by her extensive critical and active engagement with ritual and altered states of being, as part of re-discovering Mircea Eliade’s universal 'Sacred Heritage’, Gilbert’s work dramatises and explores the foundation of primordial cosmologies witnessed within myth, alchemy and nature rituals, folkloric storytelling and music.

Gilbert fashions a visceral and fearless language forged of hybrid symbologies, shot through with humour and a purposeful iconoclasm. Her singular ritualized and obsessive methods catalyze transferred emotional states to activate a ‘feeling’ or connection in the audience, with the works functioning as portals to different realities of thought and vision.

 Recent immersive fieldwork with indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and Atacama Desert in Chile has seen her using 3D sound and scanning, collaborating with experts in psychoacoustics, neuroscientists, analytical hypnotherapy and “wearables” to create AR interfaces exploring ancient understandings of the heart’s capacity for sensory perception and cognition.

Gilbert sees the artist as the “sensor” that picks up shared information and feeds it back, via interactions and interventions, to the collective mind; making the invisible, visible.