Simryn Gill, Tom Melick and Catherine de Zegher
18 loose sheets (folded to 72 pages)
plus a 28-page booklet insert
42 x 30cm

One way to understand clearing is as an act of removal, or erasure. This sort of clearing – as in the clearing of land for development – seeks to eradicate the messy variety of that which already exists in order to impose order and progress.

In this book – produced by Stolon Press in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of Simryn Gill’s commission for the Sydney Modern Project – an alternative type of clearing is presented, one that does not seek to contain and erase, but rather to unfold and unwrap.

This mode of clearing is enacted through words and images. The words take the form of undisciplined anecdotes, just-so stories, and silly questions. The images are rough impressions, rubbings, and a swirling mass of photographs, drawings and photocopies. Their contents are the discarded objects of daily life in the Australian colony – decaying paperwork, fallen date palms, ibises.

Becoming Palm is the outcome of a conversation between two friends, artist Simryn Gill and anthropologist Michael Taussig, addressing the complexities of palm oil and “the enormous transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop engenders” (Taussig) in two disparate geographical locations, Southeast Asia and South America.

Publisher: MER. Paper Kunsthalle
104 pages
19cm × 24cm
Format: Paperback
2016
ISBN: 9789492321374

On the occasion of the exhibition The (Hemi)Cycle of Leaves and Paper at the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, Malaysian artist Simryn Gill brings out an artist book entitled "Wormholes". At its core are subtle black and white photographs that trace the delicate remains of life in a building that slowy and gradually turns into ruin. Textual interventions by the artist guide the reader towards an atmosphere that is filled with subtle impressions.

Here art grows on trees features Simryn Gill’s latest works commissioned for the Australian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Edited by the exhibition curator, Catherine de Zegher, this limited edition monograph includes more than 100 artwork plates printed on different paper stocks that demonstrate the generative and cyclic nature in Gill’s remarkable oeuvre of quotidian beauty. The essays by leading international thinkers and writers include: Catherine de Zegher (On Line. Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, MoMA); Carol Armstrong (Scenes in a Library, MIT Press); Lilian Chee (Conserving Domesticity, ORO Editions); Ross Gibson (26 Views of a Starburst World, UWA Press); Kajri Jain (Gods in the Bazaar, DUP Books); Brian Massumi (Semblance and Event, MIT Press); and Michael Taussig (What Color is The Sacred? UCP).
Contributors: Catherine de Zegher, Carol Armstrong, Lilian Chee, Ross Gibson, Kajri Jain, Brian Massumi, Michael Taussig,

Authors: Jessica Morgan, Russell Storer, Michael Taussig
Publisher: Walther Koenig


Simryn Gill is interested in how we understand our place in the world, and each other, through things. Since the early 1990s, she has translated a wide array of materials, objects and sites into artworks that question time, history, place and the micropolitics of daily life.

By photographing, casting, collecting, tearing and arranging things she has found, bought, and been given, Gill opens up the operations of material culture and explores the ways that meaning transforms and translates into different contexts. This publication is the first monograph to be published on this significant artist, whose subtle, humorous and powerful works have been exhibited around the world.

Published in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, this catalogue features writing by curators Jessica Morgan and Russell Storer and anthropologist Michael Taussig, as well as three visual essays featuring a selection of images from the past two decades, providing a richly textured, idiosyncratic overview of Gill’s practice.

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.

128 pages, 221mm x 188mm
ISBN: 978-3883-75-818-3, Paperback
Publisher: Walther König

Between 2000 and 2003, three years after the Southeast Asian financial crisis, artist Simryn Gill took a series of 117 photographs of abandoned buildings throughout Peninsula Malaysia - old buildings as well as new, never completed ones. The structures photographed range from the traditional to the colonial to the ultra modern.
Standing Still is a haunting document of a brief period in the life of a nation and a region. The artist used a highly saturated colour film to make vibrant images of a melancholy subject matter: the obliterating forces of tropical flora and climate; the decay of socio-economic dreams and individual fantasies; the passage of time. Part of the way through the project, the film that the artist was using was discontinued by the manufacturer, giving an added poignancy to the decay and obsolescence in the pictures. To quote Simryn Gill: "[it] embeds into the very substance of this series a sense that the time that we live in is falling into disrepair...even as we still actively occupy its present."