Simryn Gill

Simryn Gill is an artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and writing. She is known for her collecting, and has produced many works synthesizing ephemera that she has collected. Gill was born in Singapore in 1959, and has since lived in Malaysia, India and the United Kingdom. She divides her time between Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia. Her diverse background has informed and influenced her work, drawing on imagery and resources from her various homes

Gill's work is said to embody a sense of "in-between-ness", with pieces inspired by her various homes and the influence of place. She acknowledged the irony this brought to her 2013 feature in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, saying "mine is not a representative voice—in fact, it's entirely the opposite of that possibility … Representation is a very strange notion." Her work has been said to occupy a space of transition and compromise, taking small mementos and fleeting moments of everyday life to construct a sense of belonging.Red Hot (1992), a Native American headdress made from dried chilies, was made from Gill's homegrown chilies while she was completing projects from a 1950s boy scout manual with her son. This gentle incursion of the everyday into Gill's art is acknowledged in the foreword to the publication accompanying Gill's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2008-09. Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor characterizes her as "an artist whose approach is rigorous yet sensual, conceptual yet tactile."

Gill is a systematic collector, "especially of books as objects of reverence and dispute".Roadkill (1999–2000) features hundreds of items collected from the side of the road, including flattened plastic and discarded rubbish. In many of these works, audiences are invited to play with and reposition the items, leaving interpretation of meaning to the viewer.

Her photographic works often come in series. My Own Private Angkor, 2007–2009, spans 90 photographs taken in an abandoned and decaying housing development in Malaysia. The estate, one the fringe of Port Dickson, had been ransacked for anything of value and left to the tropical elements. The name of the series alludes to "the ruins of a civilization that had been suddenly curtailed", that of the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia. Similarly, the series Standing Still (2000) examines deserted and ruined architecture across the Malaysian peninsula following the country's economic decline.

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