Change is reciprocal. You can’t change something without it changing you too.

How has work impacted your body? How has it changed your functionality?

Gillian stands on one end of a balanced plank and on the other end is a large block of concrete. She walks along the plank to the concrete and chips away at the concrete with a chisel, occasionally returning to the other side to check their relative weights until the see-saw balances perfectly. The concrete becomes a sculptural equivalent of Gillian. A likeness in mass.

A self portrait, baring all the scars of the work that made it.

Adam & Gillian have designed a modernist, durational performance that results in a sculptural installation.

The work speaks to their established practice of durational performance installation, but is also a personal reflection upon the performer’s relationship with their body. Gillian has osteonecrosis, a degenerative condition that limits her movement. They struggle to speak about this and how it relates to their practice and have decided that the best way to communicate it is through their work together. Using the performance as a focal point to involve audiences and other artists in a discussion around how we see ourselves and how that influences what we make and do.

We invite people to use this performance as a focal point for discussions and reflections around their own body, how work has shaped it, and how they view it.

‘Potent, unsettling and discomforting, about success and failure, endurance and breakdown.’ –  Lynn Gardner, The Guardian.  

BALANCE has been supported by IOU Creation Centre, Lancaster Arts, The Peter Scott Gallery, MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, through the Turner on Tees programme for Turner Prize 2026. Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

  • About The Event

    Time: 2pm until 8pm

    Duration: 6 Hours

    This event is free and requires no booking. You are able to watch this performance art for a long as you like and there are no restrictions of when you can leave.

  • About The Artists

    Gillian is a Glasgow based performance practitioner. She makes rigorous attempts to build and control her environment over hours, and sometimes days, by undertaking physically demanding and mentally exhausting durational performances. Gillian’s interest lies in the fleeting moment where her will to succeed meets her diminishing physical ability to complete each task.

    Adam is a visual artist, writer and film-maker. He’s particularly interested in the connections between seemingly disparate subjects and how meaning can be found through exploration.

    Together, they make a form of durational sculpture and their practice seeks to explore the notion of ‘the imagined ideal’ through subjective performance, objective experimentation, documentation and observation.

    Frequently, their work is concerned with materiality, repetition and failure.