MEDIUM

Installation View, MEDIUM, Esther Gamsu, David Dale Gallery, 2025.

MEDIUM
Esther Gamsu
David Dale Gallery
11.10 – 29.11.2025

As I tune into your energy, Esther, I feel really nervous. I feel like this nervy, anxious energy. It’s not about me, it’s about your life and your situation. I feel like I’m walking over hot coals –– that kind of sensation –– and a lot of trepidation, a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, and you’re holding your breath because I think you’re waiting to hear about something. That’s really critical, that will change your situation radically for the positive, I think, more than the negative, but if you don’t get a positive answer then you’re really not in a great place. So, you’re waiting –– is that true?

I feel like this is more about career stuff, rather than personal, like relationship stuff. I think it’s more about the potential of either studying or a job or something that will take you forward in a direction that you really want to go in. And it seems imminent, you know, like over the next week or so that you’re going to hear.

You’ve got the victory card here, so I think that you’ll probably get your job and then you’ll freak out. Oh, like all your doubts and fears will come up, and you just have to take a deep breath and say, “Is that real, no? Is that real, no?”, because the moon is about reflection and illusion. It’s about your fears coming up, but when you really shine a light on it, they disappear like smoke. “Is it real?” “Is that my responsibility?” “Does that really matter?” Look at the bigger picture.

And that goes for your love life, too. Until you have a different relationship with yourself, you’re gonna attract guys who want you to be their Mummy, and you want them to be your Daddy and make all the decisions for you. And then you get angry with them because you don’t like their decisions, and then you don’t have any sex because you’re their mother and they don’t make love to their mother.

So why should everybody have to like you and think you’re so wonderful?… Bigger picture, baby.

And you have to start doing it for yourself, because you’re not 21 anymore. You’re not even 25 anymore, right? You’re on the 30 hump, right? So, this is you wanting to get married, wanting to get babies, wanting to work, wanting to… That’s really stressful.

Okay? This is the only job you have in life: to be true to yourself. Which self? Your higher self, your higher self, and you’re very intuitive and you’re very interested in spiritual things but you’re also scared that you’re going to misuse it. So, the only way you can have confidence in yourself is to trust it. Try it, trust it, try it, and see if it works or not. Because, honey, what you’re doing doesn’t work now. It doesn’t really work for you. It makes you unhappy, it makes you stressed, and it doesn’t make you shine.

Within her practice, Esther Gamsu combines sculpture, film, and textiles, to explore and reframe personal and collective memory, identity, and desire in late capitalist society. Interested in the blurring of high and low culture and influenced by the Postmodernist writing of Jan Verwoert and Nicolas Bourriaud, Gamsu employs fandom and appropriation as critical methodologies. By playing with scale and DIY aesthetics, Gamsu uses humour to reclaim and re-contextualise popular culture and challenge entrenched cultural ideologies.

Photo credit: Max Slaven

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