'New Steel Sculpture'

this exhibition was specifically commissioned for The Orangery, Rufford Craft Centre, Nottinghamshire,

"If all sculpture is a form of magic, an illusion of space contained within real space, then Gillian Brent is a fine magician.

This is a collection of works of art in which the landscape and the personal, the body as an instrument for measuring, defining and containing space, are joined together. It is not an overtly feminist position but there is a sensibility at work that sees a subtle set of relationships between our bodies as instruments, the artefacts we have created to serve us as sophisticated beings and the natural facts of the world around us. It is dangerous nowadays in this time of political correctness to suggest that this is something a woman might understand at a deeper, more complex level than a man but I cannot think of many male sculptors whose work has equivalencies to this body of work. "

From 'Stuff and sense', a piece written for the exhibition by David Manley, Artist and Writer
Dean of the School of Art and Design, University of Derby

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