SORCERESS. 2016

This series was created during a Directional Forces residency in a working asylum complex in the woods of Bedburg-Hau, Germany, a site haunted by its history as a place of Nazi medical experiments and euthanasia. The atmosphere of the building and forest carried a tangible charge; it felt as if the screams of the past still moved through the corridors, seeping into the present. Working there meant inhabiting an architecture saturated with unacknowledged violence, where the past did not feel distant or abstract but present in the air, the walls, the trees.

In response, Gilbert developed a nocturnal, kinetic practice, working energetically late at night when the building was quiet and the atmosphere thickened. She dragged branches from the surrounding forest to build raw assemblage sculptures, using the woods as both material resource and psychic buffer for the institution’s history. In parallel, she dipped her hands into dense screen-printing ink and repeatedly dragged them across hundreds of sheets of paper in what she came to call “hand screams”. These gestures were less about image-making and more about letting energy pass through the body into matter, using movement, repetition, and contact as a form of spell work.

A central work in the series is a large “nutcage” constructed from trees of the forest. The title plays darkly on the language of the asylum, yet the structure itself is porous, something you can easily step in and out of. It operates as a three-dimensional pun and a psychic device, a cage that does not finally hold you, echoing the tarot card of The Hanged Man, where suspension and inversion signal a shift in perception rather than absolute imprisonment.

The resulting series sits somewhere between drawing, performance trace, and psychic seismograph. Each mark holds a compressed charge of history and presence, an imprint of contact with a site where care and harm have been violently entangled. The “hand screams” and branch assemblages become instruments for metabolising what cannot be spoken easily, offering the viewer not a straightforward narrative of the past, but the residue of having stood inside a charged place and choosing, instead of silence, to work as a sorceress.