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.

“BERT GILBERT IS A BREATHING WORK OF ART.”

BRIT PARKS, UNPOLISHED MAGAZINE

“Gilbert’s work may be humorous and sly, but it’s also unflinching in bearing witness to physical and emotional abuse, and biological grief. It counters the trauma with its antidote, the power of resilience, the talismans of the sacred feminine and procreation. Personal, but also species, survival.”

ISABEL DE VASCONCELLOS

“Personal and societal transformation are channelled directly through the body of the artist in the ritualistic works of Bert Gilbert.

Gilbert’s interdisciplinary works include performance, costume, photography, fetishistic objects and 2D works. Not afraid to broach sexuality and obsession Bert has gained a reputation for pushing the audience to confront underlying desires and taboo,

There are allusions to Jungian analytical psychology perhaps most obviously in the works, ‘Shadow of my Former Self’ and ‘Animus’ and to alchemy and symbolism throughout the artists practice,

The attitude, frankness and originality of the artist makes her a highly potent force and this is sadly a quality which is often lacking in an increasingly po-faced art world.

Her performances can be seen as essential interventions, calling for malleability in a congealing culture. “