About

‘equally surrealist and realist’

Urban Exploration kicked it all off… Infiltrating hidden places, transgressing and trespassing …

The way I often choose to work is best described as “expressionist documentary.” Darkly poetic explorations of places. Stories and explorations of real things, real places, reinterpreted through an expressionistic, subjective and wholly immersed direct experience.

The deep role of time and change is the basic subject matter for all of my work. I’m interested in the “reintegration of fragments” or what Anselm Kiefer has described as “bringing together what has come apart.”

I am interested in revealing images which are very strong; that offer a glimpse of past worlds and indistinct realities; where the boundaries between fiction and documentary blur, and memories take on a life of their own.

I’m interested in exploring ‘magical locales’ (ref. Ivan Chteglov) and liminal spaces, in real life and in the mind.

About me (more factual!)

I am currently Artist and Writer in Residence at the Swedenborg Society Swedenborg House London. I am writing a graphic historical fiction and creating/curating art work that explores themes suggested by the life and work of Philip James de Loutherbourg. I got interested in De Loutherbourg when researching my Ph.D. He was a pivotal figure in the development of art and a remarkably significant interdisciplinary artist. The Swedenborg Residency allows me to research and explore his life and work through creative practice.

Gillian McIver received her PhD from Roehampton University in the Media Culture and Languages department, specialising in Art History and Cinema Studies. She is interested in visual aesthetics and her area of research addresses the relationships between cinema and painting in visual culture.

Gillian is the author of Art History For Filmmakers: The Art Of Visual Storytelling (Bloomsbury 2016), the first comprehensive survey of the historical and aesthetic relationship between cinema and visual art. Her recent book is Art and the Historical Film: between Realism and the Sublime.

She makes films, has curated many live art projects and exhibitions and ran an East London gallery. She was Associate Lecturer in Performance Design and Practice at Central St Martins and in Film and Media at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. Her current research interests include media archaeology, art and film and Egyptian cinema.

She blogs at http://arthistoryfilm.org/ and at http://www.theartraveller.com