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Pearls is a full colour photographic record of Simryn Gill’s ongoing bead-making project which she began in 1999. The book brings together over sixty sets of beads, each hand-rolled from torn pages of books given to the artist by friends and acquaintances from titles such as Gandhi’s autobiography, Freud’s essay on Anxiety and the manual Ikebana for Beginners. The compelling beauty of Pearls wrestles with the disturbing reality that each set of beads exists at the expense of a book’s destruction. The transformation of books into beads ponders what is gained and what is lost when objects or bodies of knowledge are traded, exchanged and circulated. Gill gifts each set of beads back to the person who gave her the book, completing, in her words, a ‘transaction’ that lies at the heart of the Pearls project. Whether or not these hand rolled beads are curious artefacts, items of jewellery, artworks or paper garlands, Gill's book project ultimately makes us think about where these categories begin and end.
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