Kylie Stillman

25 Nov 2023 – 18 Feb 2024
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Dunns Road, Mornington Victoria
https://mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au

Glimmer Warning features the artist’s recent works on paper, sculpture and site-specific work created for this exhibition.

After studying painting at RMIT, Kylie Stillman’s practice evolved to utilising scalpel blades, jigsaws, sewing materials and drills to alter objects and create negative spaces that depict ‘signs of life’. Birds, plant life and the artist’s own scribbles are frequently used as subject matter. Her inventive works draw from both modern art and craft traditions.

‘Glimmers’ are considered the opposite of ‘triggers’ and its use in the title is a deliberate play on the content warning statement. For Stillman, the title embodies encounters with nature that form traces of life, spark joy, create safe spaces of interaction and become her own ‘glimmers’.

25 Nov 2023 – 18 Feb 2024
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Dunns Road, Mornington Victoria
https://mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au

‘Lexicon’ a temporary site-specific work commissioned by MPRG to feature in Kylie Stillman’s ‘Glimmer Warning’ exhibition.

Lexicon is defined as the vocabulary of a person or richness of language, often used to describe the knowledge that one has about a word’s meanings, use, form and relationship with other words.

A lexicon can be thought of as a mental dictionary. It is a work the artist had found appearing frequently in an academic context describing an artistic oeuvre or practice. It is also the shade of white of the MPRG foyer walls. Thinking about this commission and amused by the paint colour name, the artist grabbed a sample pot from the paint store and for a reason she can’t explain grabbed a handful of paint swatches in the same shade.

Using this as an opportunity to continue her love for the ephemeral, site-specific and expanded approach to painting and to work beyond the confines of a frame, she created a piece that is intrinsically linked to the wall that supports it.

The initial approach was immediately to work with thread. Starting with a stitch on paper then transferring it to the wall and hand-fixing extended lines of thread onto the wall, these tendril-like, one meter in diameter vortexes suggest movement and excess, where humble palm-sized drawings have become wall scaled interventions, forming a visual lexicon of geometry and nature.

1 November 2023 - 20 January 2024
Town Hall Gallery
360 Burwood Road Hawthorn, Melbourne
https://www.boroondara.vic.gov.au

‘Our Place: 20 Years of Town Hall Gallery’ is a major exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of Town Hall Gallery. Significant artworks from the Town Hall Gallery Collection have been grouped within the themes of ‘People’, ‘Places’ and ‘Perspectives’, showcasing the vital role of the gallery in reflecting a sense of community and shared history in Boroondara.

Featuring some of Australia’s most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, ‘Our Place: 20 Years of Town Hall Gallery’ recognises the breadth of talent living, working, or studying in the municipality. Magnetic examples of portraiture, vivid depictions of man made and natural places, and contemporary art forms translating unique ways of seeing the world, create a version of recent art history that celebrates 20 years of life and art in this place.

Featuring: Yvonne Audette AM, Samara Adamson-Pinczewski, John Brack, Sir William Dargie CBE, Alfred Engel, Emily Floyd, Tony Lloyd, Helen Maudsley, Lin Onus, Selina Ou, Kylie Stillman, Fred Williams OBE, Dora Wilson, John Young AM and others.

Exhibited at Sydney Contemporary 2023, Carriageworks Sydney
Courtesy of Utopia Art Sydney Booth #C01

Featuring: Tony Coleing, Helen Eager, Christopher Hodges,
Donna Green, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Makinti Napanangka, Yukultji Napangati, Angus Nivison, Kirsteen Pieterse, Kylie Stillman, Bobby West Tjupurrula, George Tjungurrayi, Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri, John R Walker

View catalogue PDF

29 October - 19 November
Utopia Art Sydney
983 Bourke Street, Waterloo NSW
Opening celebration Saturday 29 October 2-5pm

Kylie Stillman’s art takes time. Almost everything she makes entails a process that step by step, page by page, stitch by stitch, brings her work to life. Its a durational performance, undertaken in private, but by necessity an enduring sequence of events programmed from the start to the finish.

While this might sound mechanical it is far from so, every step is made by hand, in full human control, ordered, linear and cumulative. The artists hand is always at work, and even when materials require a saw or blade, its her hand that draws every line marking a cut.

Exhibition Catalogue (PDF version)

6 - 27 March 2021
Utopia Art Sydney
983 Bourke Street, Waterloo NSW

Dramatic swirls of lines formed by embroidered patterns created by tiny beads and impressions from gouache create a different and fresh abstraction for Kylie Stillman's new Utopia Art Sydney exhibition opening on the 6th of March

“These are elegant works on paper. They bring us so many elements of the seemingly familiar but turn out to be ambiguous in meaning and form” says Christopher Hodges, Executive Director of Utopia Art Sydney. “Kylie has created new ideas by combining the seemingly apparent with the obviously unusual.”

“In her career, Kylie has always given us new ideas and thoughts from objects already around us. She has carved nature, trees, forest into a book, then various walls of books, creating sculpture from small to huge. Domestic objects, things you see out the window become transformed into sophisticated artworks. This show we step into a another new level of observation”

“In one work from the show, swirls of cotton embroidery stream around, down and across the surface using cotton thread yellows, reds and greens in bold open curves. Another work is tight and precise. Moving an art focus into new fields is difficult. Casting a new art language is extremely difficult. In her new show, already well established in her career, Kylie Stillman has done both, extended her reach and demonstrates there are many new fields she's going to master from this point” Christopher Hodges

Exhibition catalogue, essay by Rachel Keir-Smith

‘Mud Print’ explores the textural quality of paperback books, and draws a quiet parallel between leaves in nature and the leaves of a book, both of which contain stories – and sometimes absences – that can be read.

Well known for her poetic carved book sculptures, Stillman likens the concepts behind her making to intaglio printmaking processes, in which the forms that are etched into a metal plate hold the ink from which a printed image is pulled. As she carves into the edges of the books, the dark ink of the printed pages and shadows are revealed to provide the tonality and form to the overall image.

In this instance the image is that of a leaf pattern reproduced as a powdered red grime mark. The result of a dust storm 500kms away, driven by fierce winds before falling from the sky during a deluge of rain, the aftermath of extreme weather during summer 2020.

Exhibited: ‘National Works on Paper’ 2020, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and ‘Pattern Maker’ 2021 Utopia Art Sydney

Group Exhibition
Utopia Art Sydney
October 2020

When Kylie Stillman sees a book, she sees either something to read or a sculpture in waiting. Carving deeply into vast quantities of books assembled together Kylie creates strong, graceful sculptures with expansive presence. She shapes and fashions trees, branches and forests: jugs, birds, words, plants and globes. Sculptures that are vertical, horizontal, tall, extremely tall, short, compact, extremely long. Squares too. Of every size.

Kylie uses white, yellow, yellowish or browning papers of different weight, history and appearance. The paper contrasts the power of the strong negative space she creates with her cutting and shaping. The other side of these works, the backs, remain the original book covers.

As soon as you look at the sculptures you want to reach out and touch the surface; reach deeply into the sculpture shapes; then reach around and touch the back. Somehow, you want to be physically part of all of it and really experience the textures.

For this exhibition, Kylie’s paper sculptures are also reduced to a single, gossamer work. A delicate, feather light, greyscale plant and bird scape. An image first stitched on pure white paper you could read as a winter or spring scene. This work delicately occupies and radiates light where the sculptures occupy space. It's different. But so clearly, also Kylie.

Mainly it extends Kylie’s deep thinking, ongoing and long explored ideas about space, shape and feel. Except now we’re focused intently on a single piece of paper. Side by side, you marvel how she got two quite different outcomes from her same starting point. It takes extraordinary and remarkable imagination; about art. About paper.

- From the catalogue essay ‘It’s Not FAIR’ group exhibition, October 2020.

THIS EXHIBITION WAS INSTALLED BUT NOT OPEN TO
VISITORS DUE TO COVID-19 BUILDING CLOSURES

11 July - 30 August 2020
Town Hall Gallery
Hawthorn Arts Centre
360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn

In this solo exhibition, Kylie Stillman presents highlights from her 20-year artistic career alongside new sculptural works and sewn paper drawings. Best known for transforming books and stacks of wood into beautiful works of art, Not fully or properly either of two things illustrates the broader trajectory and evolution of the artist’s multidisciplinary arts practice.

On display are some of Stillman’s earliest ‘invented landscapes’ and new works that further her exploration of the relationship between trees and mark making. Drawing on the sewing and garment construction skills she learnt at a young age, Stillman’s practice explores what it means to show three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional plane. Making use of overlooked and discarded objects, the artist presents everyday materials such as sheets of plywood, aluminium window furnishings, furniture and books, reworking them by hand to prompt new interpretations and meaning.

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Conversation with the artist: online interview

Montalto Sculpture Trail
33 Shoreham Road
Red Hill South, Victoria
Open daily 11am - 5pm

‘Moonah’ is a free-standing stack of hand-cut fence paling panels, an imposing work that continues the artist’s use of working with everyday materials and follows her use of books and papers, to form the objects into which she carves.

These often enigmatic ‘blocks' have a presence in themselves, and in this case, the stack of panels form on one side a solid and impenetrable wall and on the other side reveal the negative form of a coastal moonah tree, a dramatic ‘tortured wind-formed’ silhouette familiar to the area.

In a style familiar to her practice, the form is removed from the block, and it is the resultant shadow lines and revealed textures that create the pretence of a tree, that is in fact, not there at all. This absence of the tree and the scale of the block of material is not accidental, it is a lyrical prompt for the viewer to reconsider the origins of the matter we use to assemble our constructed world.

'Moonah' was the recipient of the 2019 Montalto Sculpture Prize and joins the previous prize winners as part of the Montalto permanent collection.

Castlemaine State Festival
Castlemaine Art Gallery
22 - 31 March 2019

Inaugural recipient of the Eucalypt Commission, Kylie Stillman presents a new outdoor sculpture that reflects on and celebrates the majesty of this most iconic of Australian trees. Temporarily located on the entrance forecourt of the Castlemaine Art Museum during March 2019, the artist’s work sits as testament to the creative inspiration of our natural environment.

Commissioned and created with the assistance of Eucalypt Australia, La Trobe Art Institute and Castlemaine State Festival. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Utopia Art Sydney.

The work was acquired by Art Gallery of South Australia in 2023 and is installed in the gardens of Government House, Adelaide, on permanent loan from the gallery.

Exhibited at Sydney Contemporary 2018, Carriageworks Sydney

Courtesy of Utopia Art Sydney Booth #E06

Sydney Contemporary
13 - 16 September 2018
Carriageworks, Sydney Australia

Installation Contemporary, presents Australian and international artists, whose innovative and often site-specific installations range from the handcrafted to the digital.

"Installation Contemporary gives artists the opportunity to look beyond the spatial limitations and commercial considerations of the fair booth", says 2018 curator Nina Miall, "to play with scale, work in more experimental or ambitious ways, or make work that responds directly to the industrial spaces of Carriageworks".

The program includes Kylie Stillman's Scape, a free-standing stack of over 200 hand-cut plywood panels. The work continues Stillman’s use of everyday materials and follows her use of books and papers to form the objects into which she carves. These often enigmatic ‘blocks' have a presence in themselves and, in this case, from one side Stillman has formed a solid and impenetrable wall. But on the other side she has carved into each sheet to reveal a small section of a forest. In her trademark style the form is removed from the block and it is the resultant shadow lines and revealed textures that create the pretence of a forest that is in fact not there at all.

This is a conundrum too, as the view of the woods is created by the removal of wood. This absence of the trees is not accidental, it is a lyrical prompt for the viewer to reconsider the origins of the materials we use to assemble our constructed world. The tangle of trees forms its own barrier of sorts but exists too as a picturesque view, a framed reminder of the natural world.

Artists featured within Installation Contemporary are: Abdul Abdullah, Ron Adams, Girringun Aboriginal Art Centre, Glenn Barkley, Megan Cope, Bill Culbert, Lucas Davidson, Penelope Davis, Chris Dolman, Simon Ingram, Robert Jahnke, Ash Keating, Lindy Lee, Yhonnie Scarce, Alex Seton, Tim Silver, Jason Sims, Kylie Stillman, TeamLab, Ronnie Van Hout and Nyaopanyapa Yunupingu.

All the better to see you with: Fairy tales transformed
23 November 2017 - 4 March 2018
The Ian Potter Museum of Art
The University of Melbourne

Curated by Samantha Comte

Artists include: Broersen & Lukács, Kate Daw, Peter Ellis, Dina Goldstein, Mirando Haz, Vivienne Shark Le Witt, Amanda Marburg, Tracey Moffatt, Polixeni Papapetrou, Patricia Piccinini, Paula Rego, Lotte Reiniger, Allison Schulnik, Sally Smart, Kiki Smith, Kylie Stillman, Tale of Tales, Janaina Tschäpe, Miwa Yanagi, Kara Walker and Zilverster (Goodwin & Hanenbergh).

'Fairy tales can comfort and entertain us; they can help shape our sense of the world we live in and who we are; they articulate desires and dilemmas, nurture imagination and encapsulate good and evil.' - Samantha Comte.

This exhibition delves into the often surreal, perplexing and bizarre landscape of the fairy tale through the eyes of a diverse range of artists, who continue to use this genre to articulate the way we might see and challenge issues in contemporary society.

'Another Look' Contemporary Artists and the Collection
28 October - 20 December 2017
Town Hall Gallery
360 Burwood Road Hawthorn Melbourne

Five contemporary artists have been commissioned to produce new work inspired by the Town Hall Gallery Collection.

Artists: Siri Hayes, Vivian Cooper Smith, Tai Snaith, Kylie Stillman and Dana Harris

'For Another Look, I have taken my inspiration from Fred Williams’ stoneware plate, 1967, a work I selected for its use of reductive, spontaneous gestures to uniquely depict landscape. I was particularly drawn to the way the work is produced by scratching into the leather-hard greenware prior to firing. This is a direct and intuitive way of working and a lovely way of producing an image without using conventional drawing tools, it is also a domestic item, a way of having art appear more readily in the home environment not just confined to the gallery wall. It really is an ideal muse for me, allowing me to indulge my interests in landscape imagery and working with everyday materials to pose questions about the way we see, interpret and create the world around us' - Kylie Stillman

Catalogue extract: 'Thinking about Another Look, the Collection and the commission process, an idea expressed by Stillman in her correspondence about the project neatly surmises the experience as she talks about 'the concept of the borrowed landscape; that being the outlook you gain from over neighbouring fences.' Another Look is a happy alliance of contemporary and historic outlooks, revealling connections, shifting our response from one fixed in our own ideas and emotions to one influenced by the ideas and feelings of others.'

9 October - 3 December 2017
Bargoonga Nganjin
North Fitzroy Library
182 St Georges Road, North Fitzroy Melbourne

The inception for Note came from seeing the space – an informal area at the entrance to City of Yarra’s Bargoonga Nganjin building, ideally suited for small works that have an immediacy and intimacy in content and scale.  

Working with piles of similarly-sized paperback books, Stillman cuts negative shapes into the front edge of stacks of the publications. Nature in stasis, meta-language and graphic symbols are intricately carved into the object’s surface.

Stillman’s inventive works are inspired by both art and artisanal traditions to transform and elevate ordinary materials. Often taking inspiration from the subjects of the books themselves, Stillman at once encapsulates their meaning and, through her own alchemical processes, transforms them so that the viewer may bring their own interpretations and experiences to them.

The contemplation and aptitude required to produce these works is akin to the response intended by the viewer – to arrive at a deep contemplative moment whilst passing through the library. The viewer is also prompted to recall the flippancy of a ‘note’ and invited to take ‘notice’.

2 - 30 September 2017
Utopia Art Sydney
72 Henderson Road Alexandria Sydney, open Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 5pm

27 May - 6 August 2017
Linden New Art, Melbourne

At the heart of Kylie Stillman’s exhibition 'The Opposite of Wild' is a consideration of the nature of things and how we navigate and articulate the world around us. Making use of the overlooked and discarded, her work responds to the physical parameters and possibilities embedded in everyday objects. Rather than reinterpret these, Stillman uses a seamstress’s sensibility to unravel and remake, something she inherited from her mother’s aptitude for resourcefully uniting fabric off-cuts into unique wearable items. - Penny Teale

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: Art Guide Australia 14 June 2017 by Nadiah Abdulrahim

Images: Kylie Stillman, Know Your IQ, 2016, hand-stitched paperback book

Kylie Stillman, Local Branch, 2016, hand-cut paperback books, timber, saw horses,161 x 245 x 123 cm. Commissioned and created with assistance by Hawkesbury Regional Gallery

Kylie Stillman, Masking the Seam, 2017, hand-cut paperback books, timber, saw horse, ladder, 182 x 144 x 80 cm.

Kylie Stillman, Morning Pages (Supernature, The Death of the family, The Principles of Art, Know your own I.Q., Read Well and Remember, Arma.geddon, Use and Abuse of Statistics, Kinship, Language in the Modern World, Tropic of Cancer), 2017, Installation of ten embroidered books on timber bases and music stands. Cotton thread, paperback book, 15 x 12 x 19 cm each.

Photograph: David Marks Photography

9 September - 30 October 2016
Hawkesbury Regional Gallery

Local Branch, 2016 is one of Stillman's most ambitious works to date, a sculpture commissioned by the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, made with decommissioned books donated by the Hawkesbury Library. In this work, and indeed, in many of her previous works, nature comes full circle, going from tree to book and back to tree (branch) again.

But the branch in the work, of course, is really an absence of a branch, hollowed out from book pages. The branch, as the artist points out, is a record of the movement of the sun: each twist in its structure is a reaction to the source of light and nutrients. It is yet another example of how nature is more calculated than we give it credit for. - Nadiah Abdulrahim

3 - 24 September 2016
Utopia Art Sydney

A group exhibition of small works.

Artists: Helen Eager, Marea Gazzard, John R. Walker, Liz Coats, Angus Nivison, Christopher Hodges, Kylie Stillman, Kati Watson, Peter Maloney, Eloise Rankine, Tony Coleing, Brett Stone, Kirsteen Pieterse, Pupunya Tula Artists.

Catalogue extract: 'Kylie Stillman's introduction to art came from learning to sew and her Mother's way of sewing - her resourcefulness and her frugality; making the most of every piece of cloth. She has often used thread in her work in the way a painter would use paint, and in her bottle pieces the three dimentional thread drawings float in space defined by the shape of the bottle, like abstracted rigging from a model ship. Stillman loves reusing ordinary objects in extraordinary ways - as she describes: the purpose of purposeful repurposing.'

Image: Kylie Stillman Bottle Drawings 1999, plastic bottles and thread

Fleurieu Art Prize
Friday 3 June - Friday 29 July 2016
Samstag Museum of Art University of South Australia, Adelaide

Kylie Stillman Winner: People’s Choice Award 2016

Artists include: Tony Albert, Brook Andrew, Raymond Arnold, Narelle Autio, Tok Basuki, Lionel Bawden, Clare Belfrage, Natasha Bieniek, Julie Blyfield, Andrew Browne, Thomas Buchanan, Stephen Bush, Jacobus Capone, Gary Carsley, Ed Douglas, Hayden Fowler, Neil Frazer, Holly Grace, Neil Haddon, Robert Hannaford, Nicholas Harding, Tim Johnson, Ash Keating, John Kelly, Ildiko Kovacs, Janet Laurence, Sam Leach, Richard Lewer, Tony Lloyd, William Mackinnon, Noel McKenna, Alexander Mckenzie, Danie Mellor, Jeffery Mincham, Geoff Newton, Jamie North, Ian North, Jill Orr, Baden Pailthorpe, Anna Platten, Rodney Pople, Joan Ross, Alex Seton, Sam Shmith, Tim Silver, Valerie Sparks, Vipoo Srivilasa, David Stephenson + Martin Walch, Kylie Stillman, Imants Tillers, Aida Tomescu, James Tylor, Hossein Valamanesh, Megan Walch, Sera Waters, Amy Joy Watson, Geoff Wilson, and Philip Wolfhagen.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Flinders Ranges, 2016, wall mounted installation, blue ballpoint pens, 40 x 150 cm
Courtesy Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia Photograph by Sam Noonan

1 - 29 August 2015
Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney Australia

An artist’s studio says a lot about their practice. A change in conditions or location, even a new view, can lead to new directions for an artist’s work. When Stillman embarked on this new series, her studio space had been temporarily down sized. She adapted to smaller, covert spaces within her home – a desk and chair camped in the hallway – by making small works, ‘drawings’ for want of a better word.

Kylie Stillman describes these works as her “thinnest” sculptures to date. Over, under, around and through, looping across paper with needle and thread, Stillman continues her fascination with marks, absences, and the elements that make up a whole. Dew drops on spider webs, instructional diagrams for surgery, warp and weft and mesh, a feather – we are challenged to consider how seemingly disparate images relate. For Stillman, each thread “drawing” touches upon questions of how space is articulated and how things are made. In many ways, the artist’s process of making is conveyed in the finished pieces. As Stillman says, “the way that you make it is the way that you see it.”

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: The Art Life August 2015, by Sharne Wolffe

Image: Kylie Stillman, installation view, 2015, cotton thread on paper and found boxes

2015

For an artist well known for her exquisite book sculptures and wood carvings, Kylie Stillman’s thread drawings mark a new development in her practice. Temporarily bound to work in the smallest spaces of her home – “a desk and a chair camped in the hallway”, Stillman has produced a series of over 50 thread ‘drawings’ described by the artist as her “thinnest” sculptures to date.

Echoing the moves of the show’s title are thread on paper depictions of crochet actions, knitting stitches and instructions on their techniques. In other works, the artist has used a delicate combination of white thread and beads to create a dew-glistened spider web, rain beading on a window and the icy shadow of a tree. Leaf Remains, Pantograph Drawing and her Effervescent Sketch of air bubbles in liquid, continue an exploration of absence evident in Stillman’s past work while the labelled drawings of the parts of a typewriter, the lead type for the letter M and a sewing machine encourage the viewer to reflect closely on the architecture of these recently vintage objects as well as the space they occupy. - Sharne Wolff

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: The Art Life, August 2015 by Sharne Wolff

17 June - 10 August 2014
Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre

Curated by Marion Piper

Artists: Kristin McIver, David Freney-Mills, Meg Hitchcock (USA), Anatol Knotek (Austria), Kylie Stillman, Janine Polak (USA), Mic Eales, Angela Cavalieri, Benjamin Forster, Martin Smith.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Grampians, 2014, wall mounted installation, blue ballpoint pens 40 x 150 cm

Supreme Court Library Brisbane
21 August 2015 - 5 February 2016

Curated by John Stafford and Jodie Cox

Artists: Robert Andrew, Michael Cook, Joachim Froese, Linde Ivimey, Victoria Reichelt, Tyza Stewart, Kylie Stillman, Judy Watson and Michael Zavros.

Discerning Judgment brings together nine contemporary Australian artists whose work in some way spans the gap between art and the legal profession.

Article: Arts Hub, 11 August 2015 by Gina Fairley

Image: Flock, 2007, hand-cut hard cover books, installation

3 - 31 August 2013
Utopia Art Sydney

In 1958 French artist Yves Klein staged an exhibition with the subtitle ‘The Void’. While the spectacle was regarded a triumph, in the gallery were nothing but a large cabinet and four vacant white walls. In 'The Peversity of Purpose' Kylie Stillman uses the void as her trump card. Each stack of found books displayed in the show has been hand carved on the fore edges with a scalpel. Magic happens when the space created by the blade reveals its secret.

'The Purpose of Purposeful Repurposing' is a room within the room. Like a contemporary version of trompe l’oeil the viewer is lured by the visible true scale and form of a small potted tree that sits on a timber chair in the corner of the space. A light bulb hangs from the ceiling, the pull cord dangling idly beside it. Other than having the carved spaces removed from them, the books that bring this picture to life are otherwise unaltered. In other works Stillman has shifted from the forms usually employed in her work – birds in particular were previous treasured subjects. Using the scalpel as her pencil, and a clever use of light and shadow, she’s engraved loopy text, Japanese style patterns and abstract shapes into her book ‘canvases’. 'Cyprus pine' is a forest of trees carved into fence palings, which utilises the same techniques on a larger scale and perversely returns the timber to the tree. - Sharne Wolff

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: World Sculpture News Autumn 2013 by Gina Fairley

Article: The Art Life: August 2013 by Sharne Wolff

Image: Kylie Stillman, Installation: Utopia Art Sydney, 2013

2013

In ‘The Purpose of Purposeful Repurposing’ a stack of books sit from edge to edge, floor to ceiling, as a column. Within this column of books, a light bulb extends from the ceiling and a money plant sits on top of a real wooden chair – rational places for real objects to sit in real space. The device of the room within a room reinforces the illusion of real space whilst unsettling it, encouraging us to think about containing and framing. It’s a kind of reverse trompe l’oeil, as a three dimensional space points to its own artifice.  So for Kylie, the back of the room is very important – ‘it’s the movie set.’

Kylie seems to want us to think about the parts and the whole, that disjunction between the making of something and the magic of the finished product. The room is 2.4m high, the standard size of off-the-shelf plywood, and the whole ensemble can be flat-packed for transport and re-assembled on site: “It’s always hard for people to imagine that things come apart… even though it’s a corner and a floor and a ceiling, it’s also four pieces of wood and ten bolts.” Kylie loves problem solving, from working out how to make use of pre-fabricated materials, to dealing with those everyday concerns that we sometimes forget when looking at an artwork: transport and installation. But at the same time she loves “how things must always look seamless. I love defying gravity.” The column at the centre of her room within a room does just that.

And just as her book carvings take things apart, focusing on skeleton structures or primal marks, they present these forms with such skills of illusion that we can only suspend our disbelief and take the plunge with Kylie back into that empty space at the core of her art. - Chloe Watson

Image: Kylie Stillman, 'Purpose of Purposeful Repurposing' 2013
Hand-cut hardcover books, timber chair and room structure

August 2012
Melbourne Art Fair

The carved sculptures of Kylie Stillman have received much attention over the past years for their unique investigation of the relationship between positive and negative space – her forms emerge in absence. For the Melbourne Art Fair Stillman has created an intricate carving out of stacked fence palings, which is the first of her large-scale sculptures to be exhibited since her commission for the window of Hermes’ Sydney store in 2011.

Hand-carved from a palet of fence pailings Cypress Pine depicts a woodlands landscape of a species most commonly grown as plantation stock for sustainable urban building production.

Here source material and end product are presented as a conundrum – even the wood planks’ horizontal stacking defies their intended use – to be a civil divide between land property (neighbours). This is however a new barrier – a wall – a slither of a forest, forest segmented.

Unlike conventional sculpture, bleached of colour, absent of specimens, this piece dissects the tradition of wood carving. The form of the subject is built up with the same linear conversion as a cross-sectional dissection.

With gravity defying engineering its presence sits sturdily within the concerns of post minimalist art of the 70’s – the formal exercise is presented with a twist, by working with low-brow materials and a handy-man approach to craftsmanship the artist presents contrasts between, presence and absence, high and low art, conceptual and figurative art.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Cypress Pine 2012, hand-cut fence palings Installation: Melbourne Art Fair

2013

Something new has happened in Kylie Stillman’s work. It is not a departure. Perhaps a better way of explaining it would be an inward looking, a reflection on process and purpose. In the twelve small book stacks that make up this series, we find not birds or trees – the forms that have become familiar tropes in Kylie’s art – but a stroke, a scribble, a loop, a weave. In Kylie’s words these are: 'the basic structural elements and gestures that make things things - the stroke that makes a painting, the scribble that makes a pen work, the notation that makes writing, the intertwining of wool that makes a garment, the weave of fibres that make furnishings'. - Chloe Watson

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: World Sculpture News Autumn 2013 by Gina Fairley

24 May - 10 August 2014
Newcastle Art Gallery

Newcastle Art Gallery has a dynamic and historically significant collection of works on paper from some of Australia’s most celebrated artists, alongside a growing contingent of contemporary artists pushing the scope of working with paper as both object and subject. From the sculptural forms of Georgia Russell and Kylie Stillman, to the elegance of Adelaide Ironside and Thea Proctor, and the historical irony of Rew Hanks, this exhibition brings into dialogue a diverse range of artists and their work through one of the most fundamental and important materials in art.

Article: Artemis - Acquisitions

Image: Kylie Stillman, Lilies in Vessel 2011, hand cut paper

22 February - 25 May 2014
Geelong Art Gallery

Curated by Lisa Sullivan

Artists: Chris Bond, Penelope Davis, Danny Digby, Nicholas Jones, Aliza Levi, Tom Nicholson, Patrick Pound, Kylie Stillman.

Just as words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters make up the content of a published book, Kylie Stillman’s works focus on the elements from which objects are made: or, as the artist describes ‘the basic structural elements and gestures that make things things’. Working with constructed forms (piles of stacked books), Stillman effectively ‘deconstructs’ objects from the natural and manufactured worlds. 

Using similarly-sized paperback books, the artist carves elaborate forms into the fore edge of stacks of eight publications. The various tones of the books’ paper provide the canvas on which the images are composed: from the skeletal form of a bird, and the network of veins in a leaf, to the weave and weft of a rug, the mark created by a brushstroke, or the thread that makes fabric or netting.  

While Stillman likens the process of creating her works to the mediums of painting and drawing, parallels also exist with intaglio printmaking processes in which the forms that are engraved or etched into a metal plate hold the ink from which a printed image is pulled. As Stillman carves into the edges of the books, the dark ink of the printed pages that is revealed through these cuts provides the tonality that adds form to the overall image. The ‘reading’ of her works effectively shifts between the three-dimensional negative space of the intricately carved forms and the two-dimensional surface of drawings or prints.

In a number of her works, the spontaneity and immediacy of creative gestures – such as the splatter of paint, the squiggle of a marker pen, or drips of wet paint – are in sharp contrast with the laborious process Stillman undertakes to create these motifs. - Lisa Sullivan

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

23 June - 6 October 2013
McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery

Curated by Penny Teale

Artists: Maria Fernanda Cardoso & Ross Rudesh Harely, Marian Drew, Anne Ferran, Ricardo Idagi, Rahel Kngwarriya Ungwanaka, Martin King, Noel McKenna, Jan Nelson, Lindy Panangka Rontji, Judith Pungarta Inkamala, Ben Quilty, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Kate Rohde, Kylie Stillman, Louise Weaver, Christine Wrest-Smith, John Wolseley, Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwiwi.

AIR BORN brings together the work of 18 contemporary artists who through their varying artistic disciplines are inspired by birds, either as subject or who emulate through their work aspects of avian habitats and rituals.

Birds have played a vivid role in the conceptual and spiritual life of many cultures. The selected works are intended to provoke exploration of cultural traditions and symbols to unravel varying ideas surrounding the bird and our interaction with them.

Image: Kylie Stillman, White throated needletail, 2006. hand-cut book 43 x 33 x 6 cm

A series of hand-cut book carvings created between 2012 - 2016.

Books, reams of A4 photocopying paper, venetian blinds, stacks of plywood – in Stillman’s hands this potential detritus becomes susceptible to imprint and excavation. In her works there are resonances of mourning, of loss, and the quiet yet compelling urgency of absence is palpable. And this absence is made tangible through the acknowledgement that everything is always in transition. In Latin the phrase momento mori translates loosely into ‘remember you will die’ and in this circumstance whether you are a graceful signifier of nature’s majesty, such as the Eucyplypt, or a more modest plantation harvest, issues of sustainability, temporality and consumption collide. Recycling is as much an inexorable necessity as much as it can be an existential question. Can we ever return to our roots? Is that desirable? Are our unresolved memories of an idealised landscape ever more than the most paltry of fictions? Entangling these questions and defying functionality, Stillman takes an oblique stack of books and reasserts the invisible lyricism that resides within the material prompting the viewer to reconsider the origins of the matter we use to assemble our constructed world. The allure of our most romantic ruminations on the environment is monumentalised in material we take for granted. Consequently the truth that Stillman evokes with this action is of the interconnectedness of manufacturing to illusion and the uneasy fictions that reside uncertainly between fact and aspiration. - Alexie Glass-Kantor

Image: Kylie Stillman, hand-cut book carving
From top: Eucalypt 2012, (cue)eucalypt(tpyl) 2013, Eucalypt 2012, Local Branch 2016.

31 July – 7 September 2013
Macquarie University Art Gallery

Curated by curated by Rhonda Davis and John Potts

Artists: Robert Adamson, Effy Alexakis, Suzanne Archer, Mireille Astore, Julie Barratt, Vanessa Berry, Stephen Birch, Chris Bond, Anne Brennan, Meredith Brice, Christian Capurro, Caitlin Casey,
Angela Cavalieri, Angela Cavalieri and Peter Lyssiotis, Stephen Copland, Fiona Davies, Urszula Dawkins and Peter Lyssiotis, Jayne Dyer, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Joachim Froese, Nathalie Hartog-Gautier and Iain Brew, Helen Geier, Juno Gemes, Robert Jacks, Jonathan Jones, Michael Karris and Peter Lyssiotis, Yvonne Kendall, Bruno Leti, Ruark Lewis, Richard Long, Euan Macleod with Lloyd Jones and Ron McBurnie, Bea Maddock, Chris Mansell, Rocket Mattler, James McGrath, Allan Mitelman, Nell, Monica Oppen, Ken Orchard, Mike Parr, Ed Ruscha, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Alex Selenitsch, Sandra Selig, Kylie Stillman, Richard Tipping, Angela Welyczko and Anne Zahalka.

Stillman decommissions books from their everyday use, denuding them of their intended purpose. Her works reappraise found and everyday materials with a view to investigating their visual appearance and conceptual possibilities.

Like Duchamp’s urinal, once a utilitarian object is transformed into an artwork, it becomes a set of shapes to be synthesised instead of used. She acknowledges the cultural specificity of language, and works to overcome this by transforming books from mere paper and ink spots into dazzling sculptural forms. The book, thus, becomes a vehicle for expressing ideas beyond the capacity of language, and divines a pure means of communication. - Simon Gregg

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Image: Kylie Stillman, Hanging Basket: Maiden Hair and Fishbone Fern, 2010, 26-volume set of encyclopedias on packing crate plinth, 200 x 40 x 53 cm

A series of hand-cut book carvings created in 2012.

Stillman's sculptural practice varies significantly in form, yet are all unified by a common theme of ‘repurposing things’ and altering the way in which one perceives the dimensionality of fairly straightforward objects and shapes. From the beginning of her artistic career, Stillman’s attraction to the ‘misuse’ of everyday items has been obvious; an attraction that still resonates clearly. Stillman’s art often beckons naturalistic themes and alludes to her heritage and experience, yet at its core is primarily conceptual. Rather than overtly exploring social-cultural or political issues overtly, Stillman elects to challenge intangibles, which is important to remember when understanding and analysing her work. - Joe Wright

March 2012
Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei

Curated by Antoanetta Ivanova

Artists: Bindi Cole, Daniel Crooks, Anna Davern, Alex Davies, Elizabeth Delfs, Julie Dowling, Matthew Gardiner, Chris Henschke, George Khut, Fiona Lowry, Jasmine Targett, Jess MacNeil, Jon McCormack, Cath Robinson, Julie Ryder, Kuuki, Kylie Stillman, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski, Martin Walch, Yvette Coyle with Sound Chamber.

Flock, is a 4.5 metre long artwork filled with obsolete Encyclopeadia Britannica series and legal library tomes.  This architectural intervention is full of delightful contradication.  On first encounter, one is confronted with the orderliness and implacable authority of leather and cloth bound volumes with gilded lettering, yet this is a taxonomy of obsolete knowledge. The verso reveals a reclamation aesthetic, as these books are inscribed with the flight path of migratory geese; read from left to right, the carved geese literally ascend the stack like thoughts or aspirations. - Anne Sanders

Catalogue essay (PDF version)

Image: Kylie Stillman Flock, 2007, hand-cut hard cover books

July 2011
Hermés Sydney art window

Commissioned by Hermés Australia

Using a jigsaw like it were a broad brush. This three dimensional relief sketch has just enough detail for the viewer to form an 'idea' of a tree - its species is left unknown - titled only as 'Yamadori'. The artist is not suggesting verisimilitude she is simply presenting artifice.

The literal translation Yamadori is Japanese for 'taking from nature' - this piece invites you to discover this work on many levels through its imagery, materials and concept, each 'taken from nature'.

Be it the representation of this natural silhouette, the materials derived from nature or the philosophical idea of what the these two represent, the viewer is invited to contemplate the significance of this absence, filling this void with their own imagery and ideas.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Yamadori, 2011, 240 hand-cut plywood, 2320 x 2120 x 300 mm

4 - 25 June 2011
Utopia Art Sydney

Vessel is an exhibition the artist describes as 'drawings in space' playing on the philosophical reading of a vessel - where its usefulness is in what is not there - the artist plays with that space and presents it as volume.

Kylie Stillman’s art is one of reduction, where presence is born of absence. In this she contradicts the equation of aesthetic materiality, where substance equals meaning. She suggests, instead, that meaning can be born of a void. Stillman explores the interiority of inert objects, specifically containers of communication such as stacks of paper, to lead us towards an alternative means of approaching content. To read printed pages is to navigate a conventional pathway to its purpose; but to turn the stack of paper itself into an object of contemplation allows the viewer to escape the clutches of the author, and to formulate an entirely new appreciation of the printed page. - Simon Gregg

2010
Westpac Banking Group Corporate Art Collection Sydney, Australia

In 2009, Stillman was commissioned by Westpac to create an artwork to commemorate the merger of The Westpac Group using materials and inspiration from the organisation's vast archives. The result was 'Banksias (Old Man Banksia, Coastal Banksia, Silver Banksia), 2010'. This is her largest carving to date, using 18,000 individually carved sheets of computer paper stacked atop an old banker's desk. History collides with technology, and man-made processes intersect with nature. The recently obsolete daisy wheel printer paper she has used reminds us of our tenuous hold on the present, while her choice of the native old Man Banksia, coastal banksia and silver Banksia trees as motifs of national iconic status, allude to growth and longevity. - Saadia Durham

Image: Kylie Stillman Banksias (Old Man Banksia, Coastal Banksia, Silver Banksia), 2010, Hand-cut paper carving
Installation, each piece 6,000 sheets of computer paper

August 2009
Utopia Art Sydney

Form Guide is a salon of works – a combination of mass produced 'special' and 'sale' signs, corporate stationery, copy paper, poster paper (and more) all engraved with bird formations which present a scale relationship between these accurately sized creatures and industry sized paper stock: A4, A1, A0, A5, die-cuts.

Form guide is a metaphoric truck load of stationery, an order intercepted from manufacturer to intended destination, caught, hung, framed, altered. Each framed exhibit consists of bulk reams of paper, each sheet is cut in contour to reveal the impressions of avian forms, freeze-framed in various positions of life-like movement. The shading created by the narrow, deeply carved crevices creates an illusion of convex relief, impressed rather than excised.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Form Guide, 2009 Installation view

December 2010
Gippsland Art Gallery

Curated by Simon Gregg

While the essential function of Kylie Stillman’s art may be non-function, she proposes a means by which old-world artefacts may usher in a new-world cosmos. Her practice is one of transformation and transcendence, where the materials themselves become the conduits of contemplation, rather than perpetrating acts of representation. Within this process she courts error and unpredictable incidents; the act of cutting often produces imperfections that are themselves symptomatic of life’s fallibility. Stillman says her work is ‘about capturing life in a static form’, but it is also much more than that; in invoking hidden worlds at life-size she at once transcends that scale, becoming greater than the sum of its parts and a measure of the size of life. - Simon Gregg

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Image: Kylie Stillman, 2010 Installation view

Juy 2007
Meat Market, North Melbourne

Following on from her successful exhibition, The Informal Garden in 2005, Stillman was granted the Australia Council’s Milan studio.  That the three month residency offered her the chance to think and create on a grand scale is ironic.  From a studio the size of a tressle table in a bedroom she conceived of works that would require realisation in an industrial sized studio. Fortuitously, Melbourne’s contemporary art space, Meat Market, offered her the use of a large studio space for six months on her return from Milan. For the artist, the final challenge remained in the installation of the works and the reading of their spatial relation with each other and the viewer, within the exhibition spaces. - Anne Sanders

Catalogue essay by Ann Sanders

Image: Kylie Stillman, 2007 Installation view

August 2007
Utopia Art Sydney

Stillman's 'Little Room' pieces extrapolate elements from previous work. Scale rules.  Her earlier works are of the scale of her hand, things that can be picked up and manipulated whereas these works are of the scale that a body could inhabit. The delicate tracery of her carving continues, but the works move from an intimate scale of wall and plinth pieces to the scale of major sculptural interventions, whilst never losing the lightness of touch and subtle play that is emblematic of Stillman’s oeuvre.  Her use of raw materials with standard sizing, whether encyclopaedic volumes, sheets of building plywood or stacks of traditional drawing sheets, continues. From this quotidian stuff, she ‘steals beauty’ and invests the carved reliefs with a delicate and shifting presence. - Anne Sanders

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Article: World Sculpture News, Autumn 2007 by Gina Fairley

Image: Kylie Stillman, 2007 Installation view

31 January – 13 March 2012
Melbourne Grammar art window

Filtering modern art and craft traditions through her own inventive sensibility, Melbourne-based artist, Kylie Stillman transforms common materials into divine works of art. Her sculptures reveal a dexterous ability to work with a range of materials, including paper stacks and timber constructs to outdated book volumes, plastic bottles, and Venetian blinds.

Her work has explored aspects of the natural world and ways in which it can be captured, represented and cultivated in tamed environments.

This installation of three book sculptures depicting three aromatic plants (Lavender, Basil and Rosemary), an enchanting and skilfully crafted work creates an intriguing sense of narrative through its careful interplay of presence and absence.

A suite of editioned prints sourced from six original paper carvings.

As in all Stillman’s works, all is not as it seems. The Bird Poster Series reveal detailed observation akin to a natural history painter; Wrens in 16 positions, nine flight configurations, a profusion of ground dwelling and introduced species, open forest and water birds. Excess abounds not only in the details but also in the use of paper.  Each framed exhibit consists of 200 sheets of cartridge paper (the standard bulk package).  Each sheet is cut in contour to reveal the impressions of avian forms, freeze-framed in various positions of life-like movement. The shading created by the narrow, deeply carved crevices creates an illusion of convex relief, impressed rather than excised. This body of works has a density and solemnity that challenges the usual notion of a free-floating framed work on paper. - Anne Sanders

Image: Kylie Stillman From top: Flight, Open Forest, Wrens,  Introduced, Ground Dwelling, Water, 2007, Print from paper carving
76 x 52 cm, Edition of 25

Ultrachrome K3 8 colour pigmented inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 gsm, 100% acid free cotton

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
February 2008
Art Gallery of South Australia

Curated by Felicity Fenner

Artists: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Dadang Christanto, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, James Darling & Lesley Forwood, Dennis del Favero, Janet Laurence, Anthony Mannix, Tom Mùller, Dorothy Napangardi, James Newitt, Bronwyn Oliver, Gregory Pryor, Kate Rohde, Sandra Selig, Kylie Stillman, Warwick Thornton, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Hossein Valamanesh, Suzann Victor, Guan Wei, Catherine Woo and Ken Yonetani.

Stillman frequently redeploys the manufactured pre-existing forms that we overlook everyday into transformed aesthetics. With precise intervention she literally cuts into the surface of the familiar enacting a gesture in which the outcome is equally sublimely visceral and an act of resistance to form.

Books, reams of A4 photocopying paper, venetian blinds, stacks of plywood – in Stillman’s hands this potential detritus becomes susceptible to imprint and excavation. In Red Maple there are resonances of mourning, of loss, and the quiet yet compelling urgency of absence is palpable. And this absence is made tangible through the acknowledgement that everything is always in transition. In Latin the phrase momento mori translates loosely into ‘remember you will die’ and in this circumstance whether you are a graceful signifier of nature’s majesty, such as the Red Maple, or a more modest plantation harvest, issues of sustainability, temporality and consumption collide.

Recycling is as much an inexorable necessity as much as it can be an existential question. Can we ever return to our roots? Is that desirable? Are our unresolved memories of an idealised landscape ever more than the most paltry of fictions? Entangling these questions and defying functionality, in Red Maple Stillman takes an oblique three metre high stack of plywood and reasserts the invisible lyricism that resides within the material prompting the viewer to reconsider the origins of the matter we use to assemble our constructed world. The allure of our most romantic ruminations on the environment is monumentalised in material we take for granted. Consequently the truth that Stillman evokes with this action is of the interconnectedness of manufacturing to illusion and the uneasy fictions that reside uncertainly between fact and aspiration - Alexie Glass-Kantor

Catalogue essay by Alexie Glass-Kantor

Image: Kylie Stillman, Red Maple, 2007, 200 sheets of hand-cut plywood 3000 x 2400 x 1240 mm

May 2004
Cast Hobart

Curated by Derek Hart

Artists: Kathryn Faludi-Ball, Stephen Garrett, Simon Horsburgh, Katrina Simmons, Catriona Stanton, Kylie Stillman and Matt Warren.

Defining a boundary by its presence, Kylie Stillman’s hand-laced Venetian blind is pulled closed to shut out the light. But light passes through perforations describing the exterior space of a park through the absent form of a tree, to open the blind would dispel the work.

The exhibition 'Room' brings together artworks by seven artists from five states across Australia, each artwork engages directly with the space in which it is encountered and together the artworks depict a room situating artworks together in a context that derives from the ‘sum of their parts’ can bring new insights to the artworks exhibited, enabling fresh interpretation as well as describing a physical, architectural space, the exhibition aims to evoke the private, psychological, interior space of subjectivity that is the site of our imagination and our dreams. - Derek Hart

Catalogue essays by Philip Watkins and Derek Hart

Image: Kylie Stillman, Installation view, Park Views 2003, hand-laced Venetian blinds

May/June 2005
Utopia Art Sydney / Gertrude Contemporary

Throughout history and across cultural divides, gardens have served as spaces where humans can wonder at the diversity of nature and at the brilliance of design. They have also been sites of sly social structuring; the hierarchical order placed on the landscape paralleling that pursued in society. And gardens also represent human conquest over seemingly incontrovertible nature.

Kylie Stillman’s exhibition is suggestive of this struggle, the precise, surgical removal of accurately-scaled bird and potted bonsai shapes from solid books effectively captures nature in stasis. But does it? That which is excised – the solid, three-dimensional form – is no longer encapsulated within the bounds of the book, indeed prior to its removal it never even existed. However the absence of form not only reveals the space around an imagined ‘positive’ but creates in its place a new positive. The fragments of printed text visible along the edge of the void, no longer meaningful textually, become legible as speckles on feathers, dappled light on leaves, growth rings on trunks. The level planes of the marbled cover sheets seem ‘less real’ than the contoured hollows beyond. Even the way the birds are hung, their covers spread like wings, implies some inherent vitality. Optically and conceptually there is a definite movement in Stillman’s work, like the flick between candlestick and two faces in profile, or rabbit and duck. Simultaneously, there is a stillness and silence brought by the muted hues and the imagery of birds posing taxidermically and old trees stunted and contained inside the books’ boundaries. - Georgia Harvey

Exhibition catalogue (PDF version)

Image: Kylie Stillman, The Informal Garden, 2005 Installation view

A series of hand-cut book and paper stack carvings.

'The metaphorical illusion of the tree fading into obscurity, consumed by the demands of the printing industry, may soon become an obsolete necessity if the wood chipping and publishing industries continue to become more environmentally sustainable. On a broader level, however, the consumption of nature by the spiralling appetites of culture continues to be inexorable. It is important to note that it is not a tree that Stillman depicts here, but the empty space of a tree that’s disappeared, literally carved out of the cultural landscape. Actually it was never a real tree as found in the natural world: it’s a bonsai plant, a miniature, ornamental folly, evidence of human culture’s desire to manipulate and control the natural environment.' - Felicity Fenner

Image: Kylie Stillman, hand-cut book carving
From top: Common Oak 2007, Trident Maple 2005, Cascading Pine 2005, Barberry 2007, Pine (11 years old) 2002, Banksia Serrata 2012, Juniper 2005.

July 2005
Artspace, Auckland

Curated by Rhana Devenport

Artists: Beata Batorowicz, Pat Brassington, Julia deVille, Fiona Hall, Louise Hearman, John Lyall, Peter Madden, Sally Marsland, Samantha Mitchell, Nell, Lisa Reihana, Kylie Stillman and Michael Zavros.

The quirky, the uncanny and the unexpected are corralled together in Uncanny (the unnaturally strange). The exhibition presses against materiality, its slipperiness and meaning, particularly the considered transformation of substances into the realm of the 'unnaturally strange'. Lying low between the feral and the precious, these artists question what 'naturally' exists and rework materials to form ciphers for untold narratives.

Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of 'uncanny' aesthetic theory (the German word being Unheimlichkeit, which literally translates as 'un-home-like-ness'). Freud coined the word 'uncanny' to describe distinctive aesthetic experiences elicited by art works associated with certain feelings of mild distress, anxiety or disquiet. This exhibition investigates this idea in relation to work by leading and emerging Australian and New Zealand artists. New conceptions of 'what is natural' are proposed as questions are asked about the fault lines that exist across the nature/culture divide.

Included in the exhibition are artists who work with unlikely materials such as US dollar bills, a crocodile tail, car filler, slate, flies, feathers, fur, books, diamonds and sound, as well as time-honoured processes such as oil painting, gold leafing, watercolour and taxidermy.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Installation view

A series of hand-cut book carvings.

Kylie Stillman’s precise, surgical removal of accurately-scaled bird shapes from solid books effectively captures nature in stasis. But does it? That which is excised – the solid, three-dimensional form – is no longer encapsulated within the bounds of the book, indeed prior to its removal it never even existed. However the absence of form not only reveals the space around an imagined ‘positive’ but creates in its place a new positive. The fragments of printed text visible along the edge of the void, no longer meaningful textually, become legible as speckles on feathers.

The level planes of the marbled cover sheets seem ‘less real’ than the contoured hollows beyond. Even the way the birds are hung, their covers spread like wings, implies some inherent vitality. Optically and conceptually there is a definite movement in Stillman’s work, like the flick between candlestick and two faces in profile, or rabbit and duck. Simultaneously, there is a stillness and silence brought by the muted hues and the imagery of birds posing taxidermically contained inside the books’ boundaries.

Stillman is the consummate maker. Her finely-crafted interruptions into ready-made items resound with skill and dexterity, and while there is nary an uncalculated line in sight, the artist’s hand is always apparent. And somewhere between the intention and the actuality there is space for something else to grow: although the work’s titles refer to particular species, the carved spaces seem available to be filled with the viewer’s own recollections of nameless birds and the invitation to see something that is not there (and perhaps, if it were, it might be something entirely unexpected) allows for myriad responses and interpretations. - Georgia Harvey

Image: Kylie Stillman, hand-cut book carving
From top: Black Honeyeater, 2006, White throated needletail 2006, Mangrove Robin 2006, Yellow-bellied Sunbird 2006, White-fronted Honeyeater 2005, Pictorella Finch 2003, Silver Eye 2002, Yellow-throated Honeyeater 2002, Forty Spotted Pardalote 2002, European Goldfinch 2008, House Sparrow 2002, Splendid Fairy Wren 2008

March 2004
Platform Art Space, Melbourne

Kylie Stillman works with found objects - books, paper and occasionally timber - to produce meticulously carved sculptural works. Issues of sustainability and consumption, histories and information intersect as themes throughout her art.

She painstakingly hand-carves motifs into her materials. Her carvings, using a sharp scalpel and done sheet by sheet, are most often related to the natural world and include minutely observed botanical or bird forms. These resulting reliefs have a fragile and delicate beauty - they suggest a presence by marking an absence.

Stillman is highly aware of the form and function of her base materials, contemplating the origins of the paper and books used in her practice before she co-opts them into a supporting role for her three-dimentional drawings. In 'Semiformal' text is rendered mute in a new and formal role of tone and shadow for an absent life-size plant. - Saadia Durham

Image: Kylie Stillman, Semiformal, 2004, hand-cut books, installation view

May 2003
Clubs Project, Melbourne

Park Views is an installation of Venetian blinds, where thousands of holes are drilled into the blinds to allow light to enter into and be omitted from the space. The laced sections form a silhouette that references fictional parkland, creating both privacy and a view simultaneously. Whether the work is activated by the ever-changing qualities of natural light or the consistent glow from a halogen globe or streetlight, the mysterious presence of plant life is suggested through the simple gesture of marking its absence. Handcrafted amendments and ingenuous uses of materials address the relationship between an object’s purpose and function, forming inventive ways of viewing domestic items and environments.

The artist recalls making the work with the recurring memory of Doris Day as Calamity Jane renovating an old cabin whilst singing ‘A woman’s touch’. “My work is presented with the intention of encouraging a multiplicity of readings, creating an intriguing sense of narrative through its careful interplay of presence and absence”.

Image: Kylie Stillman, Park Views, 2003, hand laced Venetian blinds

In this early work by Kylie Stillman, we journey back to 1998. The title is a nod to slang for clothing and the individual strands used to make an item. The work began with the clandestine act the artist has performed countless times. The act of changing from one set of clothes into another. Prudishly performed to not reveal ‘nudity’: high school sport class, sleep overs, public change rooms, beach carpark. The reverse of the strip tease, this act requires adept movement and is rarely graceful, with fabric skins stretching and distorting, contortions, and cocoon like creations before emerging into a new outfit.

Beginning as a video piece, from this a sequence was formed into 20 stills, each depicted in outline and copied on small cards 12 x 14 cm with thread and brush loaded with glue. The thread was ‘pushed’ around and ‘painted’ into shape and left to dry. The works were presented as cards folded in half and arranged in sequence on a shelf – supporting themselves, suggesting a narrative yet holding their own – like a line of birthday cards gathered after an event – they each mark one occasion but individually hold messages and meaning.

Exhibited in ‘Long Form’
Utopia Art Sydney
29 Oct - 19 Nov, 2022

Public Notice, 1999
Temporary Installation
RMIT, City Campus Building 2

Individually cut strips of paper inserted into the 1cm deep ‘Notice-board Cabinet’ cavity.