Simryn Gill Malaysian, b. 1959

Simryn Gill was born in 1959 and lives and works between Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia. She works across media including photographing, casting, drawing, photocopying, frottage and printing, and writing. In Sydney, Gill also runs, with artist Tom Melick, the publisher Stolon Press.

 

Gill describes herself as a ‘maker of records’. Her actions are specific and playful; they involve a range of materials – books, plant matter, photographs, found objects – which she collects, orders, and re-orders to explore how the perception of culture and nature is generated across time and space. Rigorous and conceptual, sensorial and tactile, her practice involves list and taxonomy-making, private systems of classification and display.

 

Throwback (2007), presented at documenta 12, consists of the dismantled components of a defunct Indian Tata truck once exported to Malaysia. Each individual part is recast from organic materials including termite mound soil, river clay, seashells, and fruit pulp and displayed in the manner of archaeological remains. Roadkill (1999-2000) is a collection of objects picked up from the roadside of diverse cities, runover, and flattened by cars, which Gill reanimated by fitting each with toy wheels. Naught (2010-) is a growing inventory of objects in the shape of zeros picked up while walking, and shown as garlands threaded on wire.

 

For Pearls (1999-) Gill asks people to nominate a book or text from which she tears every page to create beads. The books are returned to their owners to wear in the form necklaces or fetishes. In a new series, Worry Beads (2024-) Gill has initiated a new list where she selects books herself for the same treatment. For Untitled (2006), commissioned by Tate Modern, Gill chose over 80 words, all of which were systematically torn out from a selection of over 100 books and pamphlets. Gathered into groups, the culled words are presented as specimens or collections in transparent bags, and exhibited with the books from which they have been taken, organised and displayed for browsing. Untitled explores if, and how, words lose or acquire meaning when removed from their intended contexts. The pages from which Gill hand-tore the words reveal delicate lattice-work – suggestive of an insect’s trail. This removal of words from books, evokes both the shared and divisive histories brought on by the expansion and dispersal of the English language across the globe.

 

Gill’s photographs are records of her surroundings and adopt the format of often large series – themes emerge, prompted by problems or concepts she wants to clarify or focus attention on. This formal choice enables her to trace continuities in time and space, small and large, in places, environments and built environments. Dalam (2001) comprises 260 photographs of domestic interiors across the Malaysian peninsula. Gill gained access to each home by door-knocking. The 90 photographs of My Own private Angkor, (2007) record geometries of light and shadow cast across glass panes in derelict building plundered for aluminium. Eyes and Storms (2013) exhibited at the Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, is composed of Cibachrome prints of inland Australian mining landscapes, photographed from the sky. Vegetation, (1999 – ongoing) are performative records of the artist disguised as different plants, attempting to disappear into the landscape. The series Social Insects (2012) offers studies devoted to the natural history collection of ants, bees, termites, wasps – social insects – conserved at the Smithsonian National History Museum, Washington DC. Gill’s focus in these photos is on the small, annotated pieces of paper included on the pins firmly holding each insect in place, records of record-keeping, coded, sparse and material.

 

Over the years, Gill has produced direct impressions of objects from her immediate surroundings using diverse methods and materials. These include Some of my best friends suck mangoes (1997), seeds from mangoes eaten by friends cast in tin; Untiled (Interiors) (2008), bronze casts of drought cracks from the Australian outback; and Punch Drunk (2019), plaster casts of the hollow spaces inside fruit and vegetables. Gill improvises methods of nature printing and frottage to create records of plants, animals, and objects as with Maria’s Garden (2020) a forty-five-meter long compendium, in ink and sap, of all the plants that grew in the garden of her deceased neighbour, Maria, prior to demolition and redevelopment; the series Naga Doodles, (2017), direct ink impressions of road-killed snakes found near her studio in Port Dickson; and Caress (2008) graphite rubbings of typewriters still in use by professional letter and affidavit writers in Mumbai.

 

Gill’s writing has been published in journals including Heat (2023), Slug (2019), Marg (2018), and Off the Edge (2007). Books include Becoming Palm (2018) with Michael Taussig, Sternberg Press; Standing Still (2005), Buchhandlung Walther König; Shallow (2024), with Charles Lim and Tom Melick, Singapore Art Museum and Stolon press. Her writing also circulates as “Ricoh books”, photocopied books published by Stolon Press, such as oak lane (2021) and A Machine, a Manual (2020).

 

Simryn Gill represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, some of which are documenta (2012; 2007), Lahore Biennale (2024), Istanbul biennale (2005; 2011), Sydney Biennale (2018), Singapore Biennale (2006). Her works have been shown in museums including Singapore Art Museum (2024); Kiran Nader Museum of Art, new Delhi (2024), Linnean Society, London (2024); Barbican Centre, London (2023); Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022; 2002); Drawing Room, London (2019); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); National Gallery Singapore (2018); The Guggenheim, New York (2014), National Art Center, Tokyo (2007), Tate Modern, London (2006), Kiasma, Helsinki (2002).