Simryn Gill

Biography

In 2013 the Australian Pavilion in Venice lost part of its roof. Simryn Gill removed sections of the roofing, and for the six months of the exhibition weather, light and leaves came in; the works kept inside the pavilion changed along with the building. The pavilion, designed by the architect Philip Cox and standing in the Giardini since 1988, was by then already scheduled for demolition that December.

She was born in Singapore in 1959.

Her childhood was spent moving: the family lived in Malaysia, India and Britain, and Gill remained in Britain through her youth. In 1987 she settled in Australia. Gill enrolled at the South Australian School of Art but left after a few months: the course, as she felt it, offered nothing new. After that she worked on her own, mainly with photography and found objects.

For her, collecting is the basis of her method, not a side device. In “Red Hot” (1992) a Native American headdress is made from dried chillies from her own garden; it came about while Gill was working through projects from a 1950s Boy Scout manual. “Roadkill” (1999–2000) consists of hundreds of items from roadsides: flattened plastic, discarded rubbish. Viewers were invited to handle and rearrange them, and the meaning was left to them. Some of these works Gill deliberately left in the open air, so that the environment did to them what it does to any object.

Books became both her subject and her material. In “Pearls” (2008) the strings of beads are made from pages: among them Mao’s “Four Essays on Philosophy” and a book on Highland dress. Gill often asks a friend for a book and gives it back as a string of beads. The exhibition version, “9 Volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi” (2008–09), turned the volumes into balls like those used in boules, and visitors were again allowed to touch them. “Where to Draw the Line” (2011–12), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, takes up the same questions.

She makes her photographs in series. “My Own Private Angkor” (2007–2009) comprises 90 pictures of an abandoned housing estate on the edge of Port Dickson in Malaysia, from which everything of value had been stripped and which was left to the weather. The title alludes to the ancient city in Cambodia. The series “Standing Still” (2000) is devoted to empty and decaying buildings across the Malay Peninsula after the country’s economic downturn.

International invitations came one after another. In 2006 she had an exhibition at Tate Modern in London and showed work at the first Singapore Biennale (a guide to the murals at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station). In 2007 she was one of two Australian artists at Documenta 12 in Kassel, where she showed “Throwback”, assembled from the internal systems of a Tata truck. At the next Documenta, Documenta 13 (2012), “Where to Draw the Line” was shown. In 2008 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney held her exhibition “Gathering”, and in 2009 “Inland” opened in Melbourne. The curator of the Venice pavilion in 2013 was Catherine de Zegher; the exhibition was called “Here Art Grows on Trees”. Besides the roofless pavilion it included a collage of carefully selected words on twelve white panels and large Cibachrome photographs of an abandoned mine at dusk and at dawn.

Of her Venice role Gill spoke with reserve: her voice, she said, is not a representative one, rather the opposite, and “representation” is a very strange notion. To my mind this also explains her materials: small things and short-lived objects from which a sense of belonging to a place is put together.

In 2015 her first major solo exhibition, “Hugging the Shore”, opened at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Gillman Barracks, Singapore: it dealt with migration, time, death and the decay of things. Her works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. In 2023–2024 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney showed “Maria’s Garden” (2021): prints of plants on paper made with the old technique of nature printing. Gill lives between Sydney and Port Dickson.