Gabriel Birch is an Interdisciplinary Artist, Researcher and Educator with a practice informed by the crossover between Art and Design. He studied Sculpture at the Royal College of Art 2012-2014, previously attending Brighton University from 2002-2005. In 2009 he co-founded Pavilion; an Art Architecture collaboration for which he has produced a range of funded multiplatform projects and worked in curatorial and exhibition design capacities.
Gabriel has exhibited across the UK and internationally, with institutions such as Arnolfini, V&A and Glasgow International. Important projects include Second Skin (solo exhibition Caustic Coastal Manchester 2017), The Future Museum (Artquest residency project at the Foundling Museum 2016), Hollow Reef (Spitalfields public art commission 2015), Carnet de Reves, (fiac offsite exhibition at Studio Orta, Les Moulins France 2013) and Auditorium (touring large scale video installation exhibited at Dilston Grove and Limbo Margate 2012). Gabriel has worked as a lecturer and visiting practitioner for over 10 years on Fine Art and Design courses across the UK. He has also delivered public facing talks, lectures and research seminars at Galleries and Universities in the UK and internationally.
Birch’s practice addresses the constructed nature of reality; exploring the economic, political and virtual networks that define the contemporary experience. He is engaged with understanding the individual subject’s aesthetic relationship to these systems and structures; questioning the thresholds between public, private and fictional spaces. His practice manifests through a wide range of processes and materials from finely crafted sculptures, improvised objects and architectonic structures to photography, film and durational performance. Works are arranged together as expanded installations, which propose links and juxtapositions celebrating the contemporary abundance of material and information, whilst mourning the deficit of this luxury. His work creates a stage for the viewer to re-enact and reflect upon their everyday social participation within mass media and urban space. What remains is an uncanny vision that repositions the coordinates of contemporary reality, exposing and manipulating its materiality to offer visions of escapism against corporate control.