An exhibition where you can see, make and touch

Artist Simryn Gill’s solo at the GoMA allows for interesting audience participation, writes Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi.

For those of us, who call Australia as well as India home, Simryn Gill’s artistic explorations of notions of place and history will have a special resonance. “As an artist who lives between Australia and Malaysia, I think her work has a lot to offer in thinking through our relationship to place – it is very open and generous rather than didactic or descriptive,” says Russell Storer, Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (GoMA) and curator of Simryn Gill: Gathering, a touring solo of Gill’s works from the last five years. The exhibition is showing at the GoMA until October 17, 2010.

The exhibition showcases Gill’s varied practice and use of a range of media—from photographs, to organic and bronze casts as well as paper sculptures. “While Simryn works with a wide range of materials, her methods haven’t changed much over the years – she has always used quite simple techniques such as casting, rubbing, photographing, tearing and collecting,” says Storer. “I felt that there was a line through all of this, which the exhibition title ‘Gathering’ refers to – it is this process of bringing things together (often objects she has found) and submitting them to these processes to try and make some new connections between them.”

For instance, in Throwback (2007), Gill gathered natural materials—termite mound soil, river clay, laterite, seashells, fruit skins, leaves, bark, and flowers—from near her studio in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and used them to create casts of the inner machinery of a 1985 Tata truck, which had spent its working life plying the roads of Malaysia.

She used the casting technique again in Untitled (interiors) (2008)—but using very different materials, and to a very different end. This works consists of bronze cast of the empty spaces created by cracks in dry ground, found near Nyngan in western New South Wales and near Lake George, just outside Canberra. “Simryn’s casts suggest to me a sense of instability and irresolution,” says Storer. “A number of her projects begin with a conceptual proposition – such as, what would the ‘inside’ of a place look like? Her work Dalam, for example, was several hundred photographs of living rooms across Malaysia, to envisage what a collective ‘inside’ defined by nation might be. I see Untitled (interiors) in a similar way, imagining something that is invisible or intangible but loaded with a range of shifting meanings – in this case the negative space of a crack in the earth.”

To add another layer of meaning to the work, Gill worked with Apisit Nongbua, a traditionally trained bronze artist based in Bangkok, whose family has been making Buddhas for temples and the Thai royal family for generations. “By using bronze, a material associated with classical sculpture in Asia and Europe, the work takes on other resonances,” says Storer. Is the bronze sculpting technique in Thailand any lesser than the classical sculptures of Europe, Gill seems to ask.

Similarly, in My Own Private Angkor, a series of black and white photographs, she seems to compare the subliminal beauty of the ruins of an abandoned housing estate in Port Dickson with the tourist magnet Angkor Wat. “The estate was completed but never occupied, and is now being overtaken by plants and animals, like a modern ruin. People have been stealing the aluminium window frames and carefully leaving the glass panes leaning against the walls – they are miraculously all intact. Simryn photographed dozens of these glass panes in situ, in a very formal way, and they resemble strange modernist sculptures in this overgrown, tropical place,” says Storer. “They are very uncanny images but also very beautiful, with the way that light falls across the glass or the tracing of vines and rubber strips along the floor. They also say a lot about shifting fortunes and ambitions in the world. I find them very moving.”

Gill’s work, while involving audience contemplation, also sometimes involves physical participation to unravel meanings. Paper Boats, invites audiences to add their own paper boat to the installation using pages from a 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Paper Boats can appear to be somewhat violent, with the tearing of a page from a book, but it is also very intimate and contemplative, with the invitation to fold the page into a paper boat,” says Storer. “The contribution by the audience is quite open – there is no fixed instruction for the boat, for example.”

The element of audience participation is essential to the practice of the art institution allowing visitors to make their own meanings from art works, rather than be taught didactically through labels. And this approach works to the instititution’s benefit as well: “The participatory works have been very successful during the exhibition tour,” says Storer. “In Sydney, the work 32 Volumes, which required visitors to sit down with a gallery attendant and leaf through a series of erased books, was one of the most popular works in the show, as it generated a range of conversations and encounters.”

Another important part of the exhibition is the ‘blue room’, a space filled with experimental works, studies, out-takes and personal collections that aim to provide insight into Gill’s artistic process. “It’s quite playful and idiosyncratic,” says Storer. The exhibition also provides other ways of engaging with the artworks, rather than merely viewing and appreciating. “There is the process of touch involved in Garland, for example, where people can handle and rearrange objects collected from the beach in Malaysia,” explains Storer. “It is really another way to enter an art work, using other faculties than just looking. There are no clear or determined outcomes, but people really enjoy the chance to be involved in their own way.”