Black Lie (2008-2012)
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.
Investigating the life of things across space and time
so begins the encyclopaedic entry for Northland…
Drawings, etchings, embroideries, animation, sculptural objects, texts
by Sarah Gillett
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.
Northland and the Lays explores the landscape of the imagination. By appropriating fragments of myth and folklore, tales and traditions from family histories, cautionary tales, science fiction and material from antique reference books, Northland is a place to explore desire, fantasy and the unknown. In journeying there, new possibilities for adventure and discovery open up.
My initial experience of this world was through my drawings of the intricate studies of the inhabitants of Northland, the Lays.
I looked at the gestures and faces of people in allegorical scenes, painted by Renaissance Masters and other history painters, including Cignaroli, Bartoleme Esteban Murillo and John Hamilton Mortimer and in these saw an awakening of rapture, anguish and understanding.
The characters in these allegorical paintings were in moments of transfiguration, being visited upon by something greater than themselves. The experience changed them entirely.
I combined these expressions with drawings from 19th century bronze sculptures and created the Lays – rapt, fearful, uncertain; caught in private moments of epiphany or transformation.
Each of the Lays has his or her own story to tell and are watched over by the island’s guardian, Miss Ethel Grimbaldeston, an enigmatic, stern seamstress who lives with her bachelor brother, Albert, who is the island’s registrar. Between them, they have the measure of the island’s people…
I come back to these stories and the wider landscape of Northland in drawing, printmaking, sculpture, animation, correspondence and professed ‘found objects’, both genuine and constructed, to build a framework for a body of work which challenges the line between fiction and fact.
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.
For Nin, poor Nin. For Nin neither.
So much for you to hear and fear, that owl hoot and dog bark is not for you. Come out from under your wing soft down. You are needed.
Stop motion animation made on my parents’ kitchen table in Lancashire and on the floor of an artist’s clapboard house in Los Angeles.
Collaboration between Sarah Gillett and Amy Lay-Pettifer exploring the inhabitants and topography of Northland.
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.
Sarah Gillett is an artist and writer from Lancashire, UK.
She currently lives in London.