Simryn Gill: Caresses

“Working with ephemeral materials in a domestic environment, Simryn Gill contemplates a lived social reality within the present. Through collections that seem casually thrown together, her art brings into play our day-to-day experiences. (...) This “being in the present”, or the “everyday” is elusive to objectification, which is what gives its powerful, radical character. Within our strictly symbolic structures, the thoughtfulness and modesty of Gill’s works can appear out of place or out of time, as can its intensity and poetry.” 

- Catherine de Zegher, Curator of Simryn Gill’s exhibition for the Australian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013

Richard Saltoun Gallery New York presents Caresses, an exhibition of recent works on paper by Sydney-based, Singapore-born artist Simryn GILL (b. 1959). 

Gill is fascinated by the stories that objects and sites can tell. Inspired by her immediate surroundings in the many places she has lived—Port Dixon in Malaysia, Adelaide, and Marrickville in Australia—her subtle, conceptually driven practice uncovers the hidden narratives embedded in mundane materials, such as found books, plants, fragments of text, and even animal remains. These materials serve as conduits for exploring connections between people, places, and histories. Describing herself as a "maker and keeper of records," Gill uses techniques like printing, gluing, pressing, and tearing to bring these invisible narratives to light. 

The exhibition takes its name from Gill’s Caresses series, which features delicate rubbings of disassembled typewriters. As the affectionate title suggests, these intricate works are a kind of love letter to the physicality of typewriters as phantoms of a bygone era, capturing the curves, keys, and inner mechanisms of these once-essential tools for communication. By focusing on their shapes and textures, Gill transforms them into quiet meditations on touch, memory, and the passage of time.

Displayed alongside the Caresses are works from the Let Go, Lets Go series, as seen at the 55th Venice Biennale when Gill represented Australia. In these pieces, Gill cuts and rearranges fragments of text from found books into delicate clusters that resemble swarming insects, showing language as something that’s fragile, alive and constantly moving, breaking apart and coming together in unexpected ways.

Spanning the entire opposite wall are Gill’s Naga Doodles, which were recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Linnean Society, Royal Academy of Arts in London (2023). This is a series of so-called frottages (ink imprints on paper) made from the textured skins of roadkill snakes she found near her home in Malaysia. Inking and pressing the skins onto paper, Gill captures their unique patterns before burying the remains. These works pay tribute to the serpents while referencing naga deities from Hindu and Buddhist traditions—mythological figures tied to protection and the cycles of life.

Two large ink rubbings from Gill’s Thistles and Friends series are featured in the exhibition, depicting the spiny, life-sized shapes of thistles stretched across multiple paper panels. In Australia, these plants are everywhere and typically considered as unwanted, invasive weeds. Gill poses a simple yet important question: “But how did they get here?” The answer traces back to colonial settlers, who inadvertently introduced thistles, along with many other plants, as unintended imports to the country. Through these works, Gill reflects on the resilience and adaptability of the thistle, offering a nuanced perspective on universal themes of migration, belonging, survival and collective responsibility.

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