PORTABLE PORTALS: CEREMONIAL ENTRY POLES TO THE THIRD SPACE. 2017

This sculptural series proposes a family of portable portals that act as ceremonial entry poles and axis mundi, marking thresholds between the human world and a speculative third space. Each pole, whether a perfumed, fur-clad totem, an iridescent middle finger, or an assemblage resembling a cosmic tree, operates as a ritual technology for metamorphosis, a site where the acolyte is invited to shed their human skin and transmogrify into another form. Spoken incantations activate passage into this invisible realm, folding performance, sculpture, and spell into a single apparatus.

Drawing on the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, Gilbert positions herself as a contemporary traveller to the depths, entering the collective unconscious to retrieve images, symbols, and objects that insist on return. The glossy, colour-shifting finger sculptures titled Erection Point double as cosmic middle fingers and charged antennas, at once summoning and refusing power. They register erotic charge, refusal, and orientation in a single gesture, pointing simultaneously upward, inward, and elsewhere.

Taken together, the poles form a modular initiation environment, mapped and extended through accompanying drawings, in which air, fire, water, and earth are choreographed through fur, metal, branches, skins, and spiral springs. They are conceived not as static objects but as devices for passage, staging the moment of crossing when a body is undone, reconfigured, and returned carrying the residue of other dimensions.

FIG IV : ACTIVATION INSTRUCTIONS

A PERILOUS JOURNEY OR ORDEAL IS NEEDED TO MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE OTHERWORLDS.
HERE BEGINS A TALE TO END ALL TAILS
A PIVOT POINT OF THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
A PORTAL TO THE WORLD OF SPIRIT,
THE THIRD SPACE.
A VEIL, A SKIN , VISIBLE, INVISIBLE.
THE COSMIC ERECTION POINT IS GLISTENING IN THE HALFLIGHT,
THE TAILS ARE WAGGING IN THE BREEZE
ANTHROPOMORPHIC:
SHED YOUR SKIN, A NEW FORM AWAITS
METAMORPHIC
CONSUME ME,
YOU MUST DRINK ALL OF THE POTION.
TRANSMOGRIFIED:
THE GOLDEN FLEECE IS SMEARED IN VISIONARY SACRAMENTS.
A HEART DRUM BEATS A RHYTHM THROUGH.
NOW CLIMB THE LADDER
ASCENT OR DESCENT,
IT WILL BE DECIDED SOON.
CHANT:
“ I AM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD,
THE POLE OF CREATION,
THE AXIS MUNDI
TRAVERSING THE SKY,
THE EARTH,
THE UNDERWORLD,
THE OTHERWORLD.”