CASTING FAITH: A Portrait of Gillian Jagger

Casting Faith is an intimate portrait of the life and work of the major contemporary sculptor, Gillian Jagger, seen through the eyes of one of her first art students, the artist and filmmaker Barbara Gordon.  Jagger’s monumental sculpture frequently incorporates giant tree trunks, farm implements, and the actual carcasses of animals.  It can be shocking, but that is never its purpose.  Rather, Jagger’s work searches for the intersection of emotion, natural form and the human commitment to meaning, intention, and skill that bind us to the world which we at once contain and which contains us.

We watch Gillian work, lifting, cutting, welding, casting and juxtaposing one piece with another, revealing affinities we could never imagine.  We listen as she tells us how, at the height of her mature work, she embraces her art, not as a professional accomplishment, but as a necessary act of living in the face of inevitable loss and decay.

What ties it all together is the tremendously engaging personality of this artist.  We join in her search for an art and a form that can go beyond the illustrative, beyond the aesthetically pleasing, to penetrate appearances and express her wonder at reality and our essential connection to our precarious, necessarily temporary hold on life.

Casting Faith was one of eleven films in the special program, Disrupt Their Lives,  curated by Anohni for the 2017 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

Subjects & Collections

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