Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill’s practice encompasses sculpture, photography, text and printmaking. Here, VAULT looks to the nuance in the work of this renowned artist.
Image credit: Simryn Gill, Repeating Chasms (detail),2012, 2023, installation view, The National 4: Australian Art Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2023, type C photographs, 185.93 x 127 cm each. Photo: Jenni Carter. Courtesy © the artist
Simryn Gill is hard to pin down. When asked what the thinking, the motivation, was behind the work for her forthcoming exhibition with gallery 1301SW, she responds with, “I’m in the thick of making work at the moment, and not able to respond to questions.”
It is left to the writer then to imagine the artist’s senses coming alive, conceptualising the inner life of an idea then capturing it in drawing, photography, artists books and on and on, creating an expansive world of images. Gill wants the writer to work because that is what she does with words, claiming that “writing is the basis of my art practice.” Central to her practice is the use of text, reflected most recently in her involvement with Stolon Press, a small Sydney-based venture she established in 2019 with writer Tom Melick. It aims to publish material that “might easily fall through cracks or remain in boxes and bottom drawers.” It has proven a richly-layered addition to Gill’s stellar output.
Getting a handle on her practice meant the luxury of spending a morning in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ research library weaving through the books and catalogues produced in conjunction with her work. Gill’s practice is, it seems, underpinned by discursive thinking met with a refusal to create in a prescriptive way. Its corollary, an invitation to viewers to extend interpretive power beyond the everyday.
And audiences for her work have been huge. In 2007 and 2012 she was invited to exhibit in the prestigious quinquennial Documenta, followed by an invitation to be Australia’s representative at the 55th Venice Biennale in ... Subscribe to read this article in full
