Simryn Gill
Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool launches an OVA touring exhibition of Simryn Gill's work curated by Sunil Gupta which was born of an intensive collaboration between the artist and the curator. The exhibition presents a cohesive body of work spanning a six-year period between 1991 and 1996, during which time the artist lived in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Gill has exhibited extensively in Australia and South East Asia as well as internationally. Her work, Washed Up 1995 was included in Transculture at the Venice Biennale 1995, the Istanbul Biennale 1997 and in solo shows at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki 1998. Earlier this year she exhibited a work made as the result of a residency at Art Pace, San Antonio. This is the first major exhibition for this artist in the in UK.
Simryn Gill is a Malaysian artist of Indian descent. She was born in Singapore and part of her education took place in India and the UK. Currently she lives and works in Sydney where Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery represents her work.
Gill's work encompasses a wide range of media including sculpture, installation and photography. Her approaches to making art involve adapting everyday and found objects, such as sets of cutlery, books, trinkets, banana skins and chillies into mordant, yet playful pieces: a Native American ("Red Indian") head dress, for instance, fashioned from dried chillies Red Hot 1992, a suit made from coconut shells Wonderlust 1996. Gill produces work that looks at and experiments with ideas of how we structure and make sense of the world – questioning and illuminating the ways we read meanings into individual objects, influenced by our own histories and memories.
Curious about the overlapping of nature and culture, she draws on aspects and artefacts unique to her own experience to tease discourses on culture. The artist is drawn to the many confusions, pleasures and contradictions that the present brings.
Sophisticated beach combing and serendipity enhance Gill's choice of objects and texts. In Pooja/Loot 1992, everyday items are contained within small shrines carved into books, while Deep Thoughts 1992 is a large cube made from chicken wire with a matrix of smaller cubes each containing a found object.
Text is also integrated into the artist's work: engraved onto the surface of plants or etched onto glass shards found washed up on the beach – delicate works that might be referring to the forceful spreading of the English language.
The nine pieces in the exhibition were selected because they not only provide an indication of the wide range of materials the artist uses in her work but also because they collectively resonate with the echoes of a contemporary life led, that also have poignant meaning for the curator.
The exhibition is accompanied by a profusely illustrated, 32 pages, colour catalogue published by OVA with assistance from the Centre for Art International Research, Liverpool. It includes an essay by Richard Grayson; artist and former Director of the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide and an interview with the artist conducted by Suhanya Raffel, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Sharmini Pereira has edited the catalogue, she works as a freelance curator based in London.
OVA gratefully acknowledges the Arts Council of England and its patron, Rudolph Leuthold, for funding the Research and Production stages of this project.
Artist's Tour
On Saturday 12 June Simryn Gill conducts a guided tour of her exhibition and talks about her work in the gallery. Please call Bluecoat on 0151 709 5689.
Gill has exhibited extensively in Australia and South East Asia as well as internationally. Her work, Washed Up 1995 was included in Transculture at the Venice Biennale 1995, the Istanbul Biennale 1997 and in solo shows at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki 1998. Earlier this year she exhibited a work made as the result of a residency at Art Pace, San Antonio. This is the first major exhibition for this artist in the in UK.
Simryn Gill is a Malaysian artist of Indian descent. She was born in Singapore and part of her education took place in India and the UK. Currently she lives and works in Sydney where Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery represents her work.
Gill's work encompasses a wide range of media including sculpture, installation and photography. Her approaches to making art involve adapting everyday and found objects, such as sets of cutlery, books, trinkets, banana skins and chillies into mordant, yet playful pieces: a Native American ("Red Indian") head dress, for instance, fashioned from dried chillies Red Hot 1992, a suit made from coconut shells Wonderlust 1996. Gill produces work that looks at and experiments with ideas of how we structure and make sense of the world – questioning and illuminating the ways we read meanings into individual objects, influenced by our own histories and memories.
Curious about the overlapping of nature and culture, she draws on aspects and artefacts unique to her own experience to tease discourses on culture. The artist is drawn to the many confusions, pleasures and contradictions that the present brings.
Sophisticated beach combing and serendipity enhance Gill's choice of objects and texts. In Pooja/Loot 1992, everyday items are contained within small shrines carved into books, while Deep Thoughts 1992 is a large cube made from chicken wire with a matrix of smaller cubes each containing a found object.
Text is also integrated into the artist's work: engraved onto the surface of plants or etched onto glass shards found washed up on the beach – delicate works that might be referring to the forceful spreading of the English language.
The nine pieces in the exhibition were selected because they not only provide an indication of the wide range of materials the artist uses in her work but also because they collectively resonate with the echoes of a contemporary life led, that also have poignant meaning for the curator.
The exhibition is accompanied by a profusely illustrated, 32 pages, colour catalogue published by OVA with assistance from the Centre for Art International Research, Liverpool. It includes an essay by Richard Grayson; artist and former Director of the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide and an interview with the artist conducted by Suhanya Raffel, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Sharmini Pereira has edited the catalogue, she works as a freelance curator based in London.
OVA gratefully acknowledges the Arts Council of England and its patron, Rudolph Leuthold, for funding the Research and Production stages of this project.
Artist's Tour
On Saturday 12 June Simryn Gill conducts a guided tour of her exhibition and talks about her work in the gallery. Please call Bluecoat on 0151 709 5689.