SHADOWS OF MY FORMER SELF / WRESTLING WITH MY INNER DEMONS. 2016

Created during a Directional Forces residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf, this work centres on a single, life-sized “shadow skin” made from clear plastic sheeting smeared with household black gloss paint. The paint is poured, dragged, and scraped across the surface until it records a frenzy of gestures and hardens into a flayed, translucent silhouette with claw-like extremities: crudely human, yet clearly other.

Activated in performance, the shadow skin is lifted, dragged, and wrapped around Gilbert’s body, then released into the wind where it billows and contorts into a shifting, human-scale presence. Neither costume nor sculpture in any stable sense, it functions as an unstable membrane that alternately clings to and escapes the artist, a thin, toxic, reflective double that refuses to stay still.

Filmed and photographed as it flickers across asphalt and air, the work documents a physical struggle with an inner demon-double, staging psychic conflict as something precarious, messy, and weather-torn rather than neat or resolved. What remains afterward is a crumpled, wind-marked relic: a fragile fossil of confrontation with the self, and an early rehearsal in Gilbert’s ongoing project of re-embodying wounds as sites of passage and transformation.