Investigating the life of things across space and time
If it's not a meteorite, it's a meteorwrong. This is an ongoing series of drawings, collages, installations and texts inspired by the meteorite identification guideline opinions of Dr Randy Korotev, a lunar geochemist.
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.
From its beginning in family history this epic origin story show journeys through dark matter to reveal bodies circling, blind boxing, fortune seekers, meteorite impacts, doomed romance, interstellar collisions and moon mining.
Ongoing series of image interventions spanning 100 years through collage, pencil, paint, thread and cutting on original postcards produced between 1897-1997.
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.
Hanging on to a space rock for dear life. Existential ongoing series of drawings, collages and original prints using asteroids as a metaphor to focus on my relationship with my own body, with the unknowability of other bodies and my place in the universe.
Stop motion animation made on my parents' kitchen table in Lancashire and on the floor of an artist's clapboard house in Los Angeles.
Everything we can see, feel and touch makes up only 5% of the universe. Dark, unexplained forces dominate. This series of drawn speculative sci-fi magazine covers presents invisible influences from astrophysics, spiritualism and divinity as cultural equals.
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.
Flint nodules are trace fossils; positive casts of negative spaces once filled with organic life. In this series of photographs taken in my lap on beaches in Great Britain flint pebbles become asteroids hurtling through space.
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.
A series of cyanotypes based on technical drawings from a Victorian illustrated encyclopedia.
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.
Nin is one of thirty Lays I drew whilst visiting Northland. I captured her in the wild and the writer Amy Lay Pettifer recounted her story for our study.
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.
A visual diary of a journey into the unknown, made during an artist residency at the University of Calgary.
A collage audio piece recorded live on my phone at a gathering in a flat in Hackney. I handed out sections of a landscape poem that I had written to the group of women who had assembled and we sat on the floor in a circle.
Uganda is hot and dark. Late into the December night we sit on planks in the back of a stripped out land rover. We are driven faster than our bodies would like, the speed rattling my bones, teeth, brain, recording equipment.
Accidental large scale collage created from the process of making other work: offcuts, leftovers, rejects and stencils at the end of their lives, having been printed, pressed, battered and cut into multiple times.
Exo-terrestrial life on asteroids and comets occupying both observed and theoretical regions of space in our Solar System.
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.
An exhibition of printmaking, collage and drawing about barren landscapes, distance and time.
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..."
The first audio work I made, this chant references the moors where I grew up and the mythologies embedded in this landscape.
Installation of glitches in landscape. Tiny fragments of tapestry are scaled up to monumental proportions, creating a pixelated, textural environment that exists between the real and the not-real.
Anachronistic pixelated images created on the ancient matrix of the loom. Interventions into vintage needleworks, cut and reworked into ruinous tapestries.
Retelling of the story of Eve and the Garden of Eden, spoken to a flickering fire.
"For I am Black Lie and I purr rumbling low. I growl hard when you touch me and when you retreat. I walk softly and I am to be followed."
Drawings and etchings by Sarah Gillett; text by Amy Lay-Pettifer.
Collaboration between Sarah Gillett and Amy Lay-Pettifer exploring the inhabitants and topography of Northland.
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.
The story of a spontaneous collaboration with the artist Luke Harby.
As if standing in front of a green screen this mysterious figure invites us to imagine a space in which anything is possible.
This work started as an old needlepoint completed by an unknown sewer, that I unpicked, leaving only these trees intact. It was a way for me to look at the stage without the players.
I wanted to create a work that used just a few very strong elements to show the power of a repeated shape. This is one of the works in Quarry, inspired by a 15th century painting.
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).
The relics and ghosts of an event in a place are brought together here as if in a dream. I wanted to present a landscape of fragments that offers a framework for a narrative.
Like Paolo Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest (1470), Quarry came into existence from dark to light. Uccello's technique created a theatrical depth and drama that I wanted to capture.
In this exhibition Paolo Uccello’s painting The Hunt in the Forest (1470) is the basis for a series of works combining printmaking, needlepoint, text and collage.
Fantastical Minecraft world inspired by the lives, loves and fates of Rockingham Castle's female inhabitants through history.
Inspired by the lives of women at Rockingham Castle and their resonance in history, literature and spirituality, this web-based artwork takes the form of a sleeping ghostly female figure and explores an interior world where memory, dreams and shadows reign.
Spirit trumpets, floating figures, 3D printed objects of desire, imagined meteorite stone circles and whispering soundtracks
22 collages on expired photo paper inspired by the history of card tricks, fortune telling and travelling fairs.
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.
