Liam Gillick Inside now, we walk into a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls
1998
"Way outside the city, close to a National Park. A house without fencing to define the edges of its base. A building growing fresh from a grassy lump surrounded by conifers. Inside now we walked into a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls. The floor had been laid down some time ago. Planks of wood nailed discretely to a concealed series of solid chunked supports. The widest were certainly no less than that measure of a palm, the narrowest were at most only three fingers broad. The original putting down of this floor planking had been precise and complete. And now combined with walls the colour of Coca-Cola. Not the whole wall, but certainly the top three quarters of each, not including the area around the windows or the last small strip before the ceiling is reached. "
Liam Gillick, Discussion Island: Big Conference Centre, Chapter 1, 1997
Inside now, we walk into a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls charts British artist Liam Gillick's attempts to recreate a scene from one of his novels in which the first-person plural 'we' enter a room with Coca-Cola coloured walls. Gillick's writing and sculpture are often concerned with the peripheries, the back drops and the settings in which actions take place.
This piece points us towards a consideration of the short-comings of visual perception, possibly hinting at a supremacy of written language in its ability to conjure imaginary worlds; There is an inherent humorous absurdity in the notion of creating Coca-Cola coloured paint - the beverage's reddish brown glow is largely due to its translucence.