Investigating the life of things across space and time
Gillett is obsessed with things and where they come from. Whether it’s a forgotten object in a museum collection, an ornament on a mantelpiece, or a treasure picked up at an antiques fair, she wants to know the stories of things as a way to understand her own place in the world today.
In 2012, whilst studying printmaking at the Royal College of Art, London, she won the Pushing Print Solo Award for Earthquake, a large-scale collage work produced as a result of her winning the Tim Mara RCA residency. In 2014 she undertook a geological research programme in Ontario, working with astronomers, palaeontologists, fossil hounders and material scientists resulting in a body of work focused on meteorites and their falls.
Her set of essays Sea shells, silk sails and the parabolic etching of the night sky was shortlisted for the Intellect Publishing Prize. In 2016 she mounted Quarry, a solo exhibition of collage, print, painting and embroidered works at the Brocket Gallery, London, UK inspired by Paolo Uccello’s 1470 painting The Hunt in the Forest. In 2017 she was an artist with the Laboratory of Dark Matters, a group of particle astrophysicists and artists driven by a shared curiosity of the unknown, and undertook a residency at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects.
After completing a Lumen art-and-astronomy residency in Italy in 2018 she formed an artistic collaboration exploring mysterious cases in the universe with Tim Corne at O House Studios, Sydney, Australia. Their work was presented at Sydney Contemporary 2019, and critically reviewed as the “Must See” presentation by the Sydney Morning Herald and other press.
From 2020-2021 she was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art to make site-specific work for Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire. The flimsy copy explored the presence of the house’s female occupants over many centuries and the echoes they left behind, making an installation of drawings, 3D-printed objects, audio, textiles and sculpture for the Long Gallery, accompanied by a night time Minecraft world and a video artwork available online.
In 2023 she worked with the entomology department of the Übersee Museum Bremen on a storyshow (a creative lecture, of sorts) using the museum’s insect collection as a starting point.
From the primordial forests of ancient Earth to the newest laboratory research into cancer cures, via sixteenth century paintings and 1950s science fiction B-movies, Small Beauties examines life through the compound eyes of the queen wasp. This work was part of NEO Collections, a project bringing together artists, scientists, curators and technologists to create new meaningful stories from online museum collections.
Following on from this success she was commissioned by the Übersee Museum to devise a new work inspired by Samoa, resulting in a storyshow called Please do not touch, exploring the fate of the manumea, Samoa’s national bird.
It’s a story about a species on the edge of extinction, who holds knowledge, and where things come from. From the island of Savai’i we hear from Moeumu Uili and her eternal search for the manumea, Samoa’s national bird, whilst in the UK Gillett traces the journey of a museum specimen captured in Samoa in 1843 as “a very rare bird” and transported to Edinburgh to join a wealthy lady’s natural history collection.
What begins as a curious tale evolves into something much more universal about human nature and our impact on Earth.
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.”
It is late when I see you moving into the flat above the pub opposite. Must be past 11, because I hear the doors swinging open, hot blue noise gulping for air.