The psychogeographical nature of Gadsden's earlier work drew her to explore and wander through a series of old Asylum Hospitals across UK and Loanda Matilda Wall became the inspiration for the Live Art performance installation she created in 2005.
Link: Loanda Matilda Wall - 2005
Creating Performance and "Live Art" has always been an significant element of Gadsden's artistic practice, originally she trained as a dance & theatre performer, so the need and wish to reach beyond the process of painting and drawing is a natural extention of her creative vision. Perfromance and "Live Art" has enabled her to stretch the physical, psychological and philosophical boundaries of her narrative.
“Gadsden is creating an artwork with frantic speed, fighting her own real-life fight against the dying of the light. In the act of painting, she tells us, she is "living in the second".
A profoundly affecting reminder of our shared humanity.”
Luke Jennings - Guardian Observer Newspaper Sept 2012
This work is viseral, and pushes creative boundries and for the last 10 years Gadsden has been creating both solo and collaborative art nationally and internationally, through painting, performance, digital film and animation, with the object of developing cross-cultural dialogues considering universal notions of humanity.
Gadsden has collaborated with many astonishing disabled and non disabled artists, choreographers, musicians and composers to create live art, the ambition is always to explore challenging narratives and to find ways to contribute, through creativity, to impact social and political change and cultural diversity in some meaningful way.
Over time, and once it became clear that Gadsden's eye sight was deminishing, the activity and process of creating expressionistic physically stimulated work became a routine element of her creativity. The notion of exploring narrative through both physical impulse, sound as well of visual stimulation was vital, both as a means of capturing the full essense of the subject in hand, but also as a means of researching the full array of sensations that Gadsden was increasingly now aware and conscious of.
Click on the links below to see a selection of Gadsden's key "Live Art" projects:
Link: Global Alchemy Purcell Room, South Bank Centre 2012
Link: Starting Line 2012
Link: Cube of Curiosity 2013
Link: Talking Souls, South Africa 2013
Link: Al Noor - Shamal, Bahrain, Qatar, Liverpool 2015
Link: If This Is a Man, Liverpool 2017
Link: Shamal, Misk Art Festival, Saudi Arabia, 2018
Link: All at Sea, Dare Festival & DaDaFest International 2018
Link: Ships of the Desert, Saudi Arabia 2018
