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"Untitled (Interiors)" 2008

Wall text

Wall text

Simryn Gill

Born 1959, Singapore. Lives and works in Gadigal Country/Sydney, New South Wales, and Port Dickson, Malaysia. Pronouns: she/her.

 

"Untitled (Interiors)" 2008

bronze, 3 parts

 

Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Tate, with support from the Qantas Foundation in 2015, purchased 2022.

 

 

This series of bronze sculptures were cast from the fractured voids of parched earth that formed during a drought in regional New South Wales from 2001 to 2009. To make Untitled (Interiors), Simryn Gill negotiated access to private farmland that had been radically altered by settler-colonial pastoral use, resulting in a changed topography and the decimation of soil health through a dependence on chemical agriculture. Responding to sites most crippled by drought, Gill poured silicon directly into the fissures of creek beds to record memories of their forms and produce moulds. These negative spaces were then bronze cast as a positive form using a lost wax technique in collaboration with Thai sculptor Apisit Nongbua.

 

The permanent materiality of bronze is typically seen in civic spaces to monumentalise political, religious, or military figures. The sculptures that comprise Untitled (Interiors) act as anti-monuments that immortalise the increasingly prevalent impacts of extreme weather events on delicate ecosystems. Soil becomes a material witness to the impacts of anthropogenic climate collapse, while bronze archives and records the scars of a parched, dry Country. In this way, voids and cracks are transformed into lasting documents held in the collections of contemporary art museums—omens of a perilous future that demands accountability.

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