Public Works investigates road marking and signage systems, and the actions of workers who create these public signals. Connecting labour, movement and reproduction, the works in the exhibition addresses the processing and standardisation of language and the human body in designed systems. The movements of workers – who often use idiosyncratic and site-specific improvised techniques – is linked with the behaviour of pedestrians who utilise or respond to their public work as a social choreography.
Gers works with direct lived experience in a local environment, making context specific performances and installations. She is interested in how the body is shaped by the physical and social environment – the social, cultural and political structures impacting on the body and behaviour – and how the prevailing environmental orders can be disrupted and re-imagined by generating a space for encounter and experience. Recurring elements in her work include testing ideas of circulation (of bodies, thoughts, sounds, breath, signals), collaboration and cooperation, feedback loops and exchanges in the relationship between performer and audience.