The Four Skins of the Apocalypse. 2016

The Four Skins of the Apocalypse stages a delirious procession through fire, flood, and ecstatic undoing. Forged through elemental survival, born not breathing, drowned, burned, shaken by the earth itself—Gilbert summons new mythologies from the wreckage. Second skins, flayed rites, cosmic voyagers, maenadic revellers; each figure is a relic of endurance, a relic of becoming.

Gilbert’s lexicon of contemporary archetypes proposes a future beyond survival: a theatre where the sacred and the monstrous, the fragile and the invincible, collide. These are not costumes. These are living myths, vessels of transmutation. She calls them “esoteric second skin suits for ritual sacrifice and religious raves.” They remind us that survival is not endurance alone, it is metamorphosis.

Emerging from her subconscious terrain are the archetypal figures of The Four Skins of the Apocalypse and Other Friends (2016–23), a series of talismanic, ritual second-skin suits born out of personal ordeal and mythopoetic survival. Created in the aftermath of a devastating house fire that consumed years of Gilbert’s work, these pieces summon an esoteric pantheon of contemporary deities. Each is an embodied threshold between myth, trauma, and ecstatic becoming, animating something ancient, obscured, and still burning beneath the surface.

The Necrosuit, inspired by Aztec ritual, recalls the flayed skins of sacrificial victims worn by priests—a grotesque rebirth through death.
The Maenad Medusa, a serpentine warrior drawing on the energies of Kali, Inanna, Shiva, and Medusa, wields hands-on-sticks as weapons—a furious feminine force of creation and destruction.
The Peyote Suit, a tribute to Alejandro Jodorowsky, becomes a hallucinogenic vessel of endurance and cosmic theatre.
The Pineal Suit, with its stepped ziggurat crown, opens psychic channels and vision beyond vision.
The Viper, a potent sigil of the life force, slithers through shadow and light.
The Scapegoat, a ceremonial fire shaman, enacts the cycle of exile and transcendence.

These skins are not garments, but psychic armour- relics of ritual cast in humour, iconoclasm, and the sensual language of taboo.