Stephen Gill Interview: While We Are Sleeping
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- When British photographer Stephen Gill moved to rural South Sweden from London, he longed for a new beginning and a re-discovering of his love of image making. He started as being a kid again by inserting night cameras in the forest and discovered a world teeming with life, which resulted in a series, where “Nature was taking control”.
When Stephen Gill and his family moved to Sweden, he felt like starting again. He was tired of sitting with a computer, and his love of images and making pictures had started to get suffocated by everything around it. “Just before I moved to Sweden, I said to myself that “either I am going to quit photography all together, or I am going to start literally from zero. As if starting as a kid again making work for the first time"”. Gill would focus on the most basic printmaking as far away from a computer as possible, “very physical and tactile”. And knowing that when he moved to Sweden from London, that Nature was going to play a very big part in his work, he “also knew that my imagination would have to work much harder: In London it is visually so overwhelming and you are filtering out, but here this bleak flat open land, I knew I would have to extract something that wasn’t on the surface.”
Often Gill would walk in daylight hours and would see tiny clues suggesting intense activity, like half eaten mushrooms or footprints and turn overs, “so I started to sense there is such an intense active life here and during daylight hours it vanishes. It intrigued me to try to step into this nocturnal world, this intensely busy world, this idea that whilst we are sleeping there is this other world. And this led me to starting the series called Night Procession.”
“I started often during daylight hours to the forest to position remote cameras and excitedly go back next day and see what happened. And again, to my surprise on every square meter there was so much activity.” Gill lived in cities all his life: “I didn’t want to arrive in Nature and say I want to make a body of work, I wanted Nature to inform me. I wanted Nature to guide my work, and in a way, I was just helping it along, but I was sort of half stepped out and nature was taking control of the whole body of work”.
Stephen Gill’s (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) photographs are held in various private and public collections and have also been exhibited at many international galleries and museums including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Museum of London, Agnes B, Victoria Miro Gallery, Christophe Guye Gallery, Sprengel Museum, Tate.
In 2021 Arnolfini- Bristol’s International Centre for Contemporary Arts will feature a large retrospective of Stephen Gill’s work celebrating more than thirty years of work.
Learn more about Stephen Gill: www.stephengill...
Stephen Gill was interviewed by Christian Lund at his studio in Glemmingebro, Sweden, in October 2020.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by Kasper Bech Dyg
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2021
Supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond
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Its truly wonderfull images - they seem so tactile, so lovely - the most wonderfull images I ever saw.
Interesting work,can Stephen please talk more about the printing process?
If you do read this Stephen Gill, it might interest you to know that the Swedish word for developing a photograph is ”framkalla” literally ”calling or coaxing forward” also meaning conjuring in everyday Swedish. I thought this very topical to your description of visualizing the motif or being before capturing the image on camera.
I see you live in Skåne which is indeed very flat and windy, grey alot of the year. Also full of wildlife indigenous to that area. I’d encourage you to travel north to experience an all together different woodland, areas where the woods are many miles deeo and undisturbed for centuries, and the species of animals a bit different.
These woods are becoming more endangered and rare but still exist, and feel entirely different.
Also Fjällen, the very north up on the Scandic Mountains in spring, summer and early fall, is unlike anything you might experience anywhere else.
And lodgings available free or at a very low cost if you go a bit off the busiest hiking season.
Colors of plants and nature unbelievable, also another fauna alltogether.
Your work is so beautiful and mysterious.
I loved seeing this and would love to hear you talk about your technique more, in a masterclass or lecture.
Thank you 🙏.
A true artist ,absolutely beautiful work ,I have nothing but admiration ,amazing man .
Brilliant work !!!
So wonderful, the fox having a drink …. So many levels of wonder. Thankyou
Its so sensuel - and wonderfull way of almost letting "Nature make the images" - with Black ink and pigments" - the images seem like magic, and its like "becoming the nature" "becoming an owl" "becoming the deer" - ... its just the most phantastic photoart
Refreshing process work! ✨💖✨
Wish I knew more about these print techniques.
Also I wish I could live somewhere with actual biodiversity
Thank you Louisiana for these inspiring interviews!
Ein schöner Blick auf die Welt ,das Geheimnis das zu finden ist ,doch immer vorhanden.
Die Struktur und Farben,Wesen der Blätter sind EINZIG ARTIG ,,,een vienna
Beautiful work! But I am surprised to hear you are afraid of nighttime rural Sweden when what comes through to this viewer is your absolute delight in the process.
How wonderful. Mysterious and beautiful.
Ethereal, beautiful work!
Aways interesting to see the person behind the work.
Excellent! "Noticing" is important work.
I have intense activity in my loft every night from squirrels.
i love it
💚
LOVE❤️