Chasing nostalgia – Zahra Amiruddin, THE HINDU

Soft light glazes massive sheets pasted on the walls of the Jhaveri Contemporary gallery in Colaba. Illuminating the creases of the paper, waltzing with the indentations made by the artworks themselves; the space and its art, stands exposed. The light wraps its way around the remnants of snakeskin inked onto the sheets, much like the animal’s coil. The works belong to artist, Simryn Gill, whose relationship with nature and personal place is integral to her work.

Soft Tissue, is the artist and photographer’s third show at the gallery, and displays three works – ‘Naga Doodles’, ‘Punch Drunk’ and ‘Weeds of my parents’ garden’. The exhibition note, “Using three very different materials, the works are a record of negative spaces and non-things from the vicinity of Gill’s homes in Port Dickson, Malaysia and Sydney, Australia.” What does Gill mean by non-things? It could refer to the vulnerability of the works themselves, displaying fragility much like human tissues, and binding thoughts together.

Meticulously detailed

Her work titled ‘Naga Doodles’, is an eye-catcher and builds the spine for the rest of her exhibition. With a group of more than 70 relief prints, made over a two-month period in 2017, Gill experiments with bodies of snakes she found run over, near her home. In her studio, the artist meticulously inks each carcass with etching inks and rollers, later making impressions on a variety of papers. Though majority of the prints are black-and-white, one can spot a rusty smear of dried blood, and other bodily fluids lingering in the inked skin.

With impressions ranging from life-size, to small, the viewer is confronted by massive drawings that resemble animals from the Jurassic period, and smaller bodies of snake that could translate to strands of hair. A few weeks ago, in a walkthrough of the show, art critic Aveek Sen, elaborated upon the delicateness of the works that are built on damage, and a crushed body. “Naga means snake, but also suggests nakedness,” elaborated Sen. These are all snakes Gill has found near her home. It’s the artist’s way of relating a sense of place to her art. “She uses doodles, in the name. It’s suggestive of absent-minded, and abstractive work. In an immediate way, it relates to her unconscious and subconscious,” added Sen. The ‘Naga Doodles’ are similar to a Rorschach test, questioning its form and one’s own mind, being stretched beyond the body, and into a fantastical space.

Attention to nature

Talking about an imaginative realm, the light from the sheets throws itself upon a massive table, with objects made from plaster casts. At first glance, the sculptures resemble corals, extra-terrestrial rocks, or even pieces of the brain. As Gill says in her note, “’Punch Drunk’ is a group of plaster casts made last year, by pouring casting plaster into the hollow inner chambers of fruit and vegetables – pumpkins, melons, papayas – and allowing the still-liquid material to settle into empty crevices and nooks inside the fruit.” Gill calls it a human-animal-microbe-plant collaboration, as she recruited birds and insects, who pecked at seeds and pulp left in the ridges of the cast. She says, “These sculptures are shown on a table finished in blackboard paint, a surface on which they become reminders of sticks of chalk – they are after all more or less the same material, compounds of calcium…”

Gill often personifies nature, and has made a series of photographs with human bodies with heads made of fruits and vegetables. Sen also talked about her book, Becoming Palm, written in collaboration with anthropologist Michael Taussig. The book addresses the complexities of African palm oil and the colossal transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop provokes. “This book is important to see how Gill’s mind works. She begins writing about a palm tree by saying, “When you’re inside it, there is no outside.” This personification creeps into Soft Tissue as well, even if it might not be apparent from solely looking at the artworks.

Artistic analogy

With her third piece, Gill is more direct with her connection of place, and the nostalgia attached to it. As the name suggests, ‘Weeds of my parents’ garden’, is Gill’s curation of colour and black-and-white photographs of weeds in her childhood home. The stills immediately reflect the style and compositions from amateur photography magazines in the fifties and sixties. The treatment is deliberate, as the artist’s father owns stacks of these magazines in his library at home. Since Gill’s photographs are traditional darkroom prints that have been converted to look like offset prints, she says, “‘The old chasing the older’ might be a way to describe the final result: one obsolete process trying to look like another.”

During his walkthrough, Sen read out a Gill’s writing that best encapsulated the show’s essence. “Working the world out, through analogies and comparisons, makes the most sense to me. It comes from the understanding of knowing oneself. Empty and invisible, as the wind and water.” It’s interesting to note that the artist uses wind and water, both profoundly nourishing elements, far from invisibility. “These are both elements from which seeds are born, from which plants reach us,” shared Sen.

Gill says “It’s my strength and my weakness. If you feel yourself as not being substantial, then you understand yourself and the world at large through the things around you. By comparing, holding them next to each other, and oneself. Above, and below, besides, together, arranged, and jumbled.” It’s a thought that strings her Gill’s together, navigating spaces between anthropological, and personal beliefs. It’s a method that makes sense for an artist who leans towards exploring how spaces, eventually become feelings.

Soft Tissue is ongoing at Jhaveri Contemporary, Colaba, until March 2