Melissa McGill's fascination with figurines and the spatial voids and vacuums that surround them expresses itself in compelling sculptures and drawings that physicalize her explorations in an Antipodean world of surrogates and their corresponding negative space. By referring to voids, surrogates and shadows, McGill consciously connects to a vast web of references to do with the rhetoric of the ephemeral or eidetic image – the trace, the copy, the opposite, the reflection, the theatrical impersonation, the illusion, the outline, the dependent or contingent symbol – in short, the virtual as opposed to the substantial image, and, equally, to the human psyche, Jung's archetypal definition of the personal unconscious, and the Saturnian aspects of the personality as formed by repressed fears and unpleasant emotions. Given her interests, then, it is not surprising that McGill's process revolves principally around the technique of casting and the constant vacillation between positive and negative space that this technique involves. Working to unite visible dimensionality with its invisible counterpart, and at the same time collapse the perceived distinctions between high and low art, McGill derives a new and quite unfamiliar artistic vocabulary from a common, even banal, language of form.

In one instance, she calibrates and materializes the airy gaps within and between the dance of Canova's Three Graces to create a free-standing three-dimensional ensemble of suspended glass vessels; in another, she renders the deep folds and recesses of Bernini's High Baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of St Teresa in flat cast silicon fragments 'drawn' directly onto the wall in a vast and dynamic anamorphic splash; in yet another, she everts and fills the hollow interiors of cute novelty figurines to produce strangely disturbing abstract figures, vague morphic resonances of their former selves.

A residency at the Kohler industrial porcelain factory in Wisconsin enabled McGill to explore her ideas on a much larger scale, with spectacular results. Assisted by company artisans, she produced a series of unique porcelain sculptures, almost human-size. Continuing to work with the idea of positive casting the interior spaces of figurines, but on a massively amplified scale, she has created the very image of how we have been taught to imagine ghosts – spotlessly white ectoplasmic statues that, despite their extreme weight and lapidary hardness, seem to melt away before our very eyes. In creating such visceral visual experiences in 'otherness', might the sculptural events of Melissa McGill then lead us to consider the unreckoned with spaces and forces of our own lives?