Investigating the life of things across space and time
Blazing a trail through space, ancient Egypt, a mysterious event in early 20th century Siberia and the very human story of the only NASA-verified meteorite strike victim in history, this performance essay explores personal beliefs, scientific theories and societal reactions to meteorite falls and other inexplicable impacts.
In medieval geographies, Northland is a distant place located beyond the borders of the known world. It is variously agreed that it may be an island in the northern hemisphere, and that on the island lives a secretive colony of people called ‘the Lays’, half-creatures of tortured souls and lost dreams. Each is the only one of its kind...
Northland is my personal world-building project. It is my ongoing visual scrapbook, a constantly evolving collection of artefacts, an exposed archive of my process and practice documentation.
In 2018 I entered the world of online dating. Quickly I began to see a pattern emerging across my matches; primarily, there were a lot of men stroking big cats. At first the photographs were merely absurd but the more I looked into this phenomenon the darker the implications of these photoshoots became. This series of drawings depicts some of my matches alongside data pulled together from a number of different dating platforms.
The dogs in south London are running. One of the big ones slows down as it passes me and I step back as its nose swerves into my crotch, waving my arms as though that would make any difference. If it were really hungry it would just eat me but I get a face full of hot meaty air and it’s a lucky day.
At dusk we walked into the forest with reflective materials and torches, plotting the night sky through the trees. The images from that first exploratory night led to further night time experimentation in the same woods the following year.
Collaboration between Sarah Gillett and Luke Harby, featured by Inside the Outside.
I lie in my bed, body warm and relaxed, waiting. When I open my eyes the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling give me a little thrill. Outside low-lying cloud and light pollution hides the universe from me but inside this room I am watched over by Cassiopeia and Orion, the Plough and the Pole star and this makes me feel safe.
Sarah Gillett: We are looking out the window and seeing the world through glass, not able to physically touch it.
Welcome to the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast, hosted by Jessica Harby. This episode is a talk with the artist and writer Sarah Gillett as she begins a new body of work that explores landscapes of the nighttime.
Hamelin is a rag puppet doll just under a metre in height. She appears in So pass away the old timers, one by one as my alter ego. Multiplied through the process of etching, she exists in more than one dimension of space. She is also dressed as a fool: mischievous, bold, lost, never fitting in to the time she occupies or with the people around her. Everything about her is strange, to them and to herself.
Strawberries are the taste of summer. Bite into one and it’s a nostalgic pleasure trip. The lazy slog and echo of a village cricket match. The twang of rain and tennis racket. The arrowhead dart of swallows quick and fluttering as a power surge, scattering across the screen as missing pixels.
"Most people whose mental digestion of the marvellous is quite robust will refuse to believe this account, and yet there must be a few whose hair has been stirred and whose hearts have beat an unusual tattoo at the sound of a 'Something Inexplicable' in the watches of the night. Our conclusion is that there are such things as spirits, and in believing, we tremble..."
According to my mother, when she was a little girl growing up in 1940s Lancashire, the village seamstress was a Miss Grimbaldeston, although other family members don’t remember her (surely unforgettable) name. In my work, Ethel now exists as a 38cm tall object made from a 19th Century German nutcracker, the limbs of an old porcelain doll and an outfit I made from old fabric. Ethel has become my alter-ego – she is always in my mind and I draw her over and over again in different guises and circumstances, so she appears incidentally in many of my prints and films.
As if peering through a gap in the trees this work focuses on the relationship between light and dark, quarry and hunter. The colour and form of the red figure references Paolo Uccello's practice within the late Gothic tradition and reminds us that red is the colour of fairytales, representing blood (virginity, violence, death).
In the end, it was neither a flash nor a tunnel. The kiss had lived through many breaths and many stories, from the eager tongues of fairytale princes to the dry rubbery gums of the dying in hospital beds. Once there had even been a woman who changed into a pillar of salt.
The grinding keeps us awake all night. The slipping noise of tooth against tooth, the squeak and rasp of shiny enamelled edges filing monotonously against an equal occluded opposite.
Joseph reaches down and picks up a shell. He hands it to the boy, who is dragging a red plastic bucket across the sand. “Here. What about this one?”
Bill assesses the offering intently. “No Daddy,” he says firmly, “It’s broken here, see.”
