Simryn Gill and migration's capital

Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident.

--Joseph Conrad, Victory, 1915

You are standing in a thicket. Dark overhanging vines thread around you as they scatter the shafts of light that pierce the canopy, hitting the moss-covered stones beneath your feet. Stepping on the wet carpet of twigs, you make your way down the narrow path, pulling apart tree limbs as you approach what appears to be a clearing. You come upon a tall branching tree next to an old British colonial cupola (1)--the sort lovers take shelter in from the storm. You approach and look up, staring long at the tree's dark core, and notice how the vines hang down like lines of text ripped from so many books.

This was the starting point for Simryn Gill's Forest, a series of black-and-white photographs made between 1996 and 1998, images of books cut up and carefully woven into an actual tropical landscape. Several sites were chosen for these interventions: the above-mentioned tree and cupola at Fort Canning in Singapore, an old colonial mansion, an abandoned army base, and the Gill family bungalow in Port Dickson, on the southwest coast of Malaysia. The texts were "naturalized," as it were, returned to earth and soil. The large-scale photographs (about four by three feet each) were then dispersed to various exhibition sites across the Pacific: Yokohama, Sydney, Singapore, Los Angeles--geographical dissemination fulfilling the cycle enacted within each photograph, a return to the world. You emerge from the forest, only to want to be absorbed back again.

Gill's site interventions, which revolve loosely around narratives of colonialism in Southeast Asia, have conventionally been explained biographically: Her works are supposedly about her migration and travel among Singapore, Malaysia, England, India, and Australia. Washed Up (1995), for example, a collection of beach-debris-like glass fragments, each etched with evocative words such as war or "nervous," would thus ostensibly tell a tale of our contingent life histories, our "washing up" in various parts of the world, Yet this description hardly gets us close to the work; it fails to bring these mute objects into our imaginative space. How do we explain what the works themselves enact within their own structure? Each fragment in Washed Up, for instance, conjures up a string of images and memories for the viewer--the biographical move--but acquires a different, more complex aura as the work as a whole recedes from the viewer. Individual word fragments then compete with one another, metaphor warring against meta phor, even before our arrival on the scene. We are washed up as viewers.

It is immediately apparent that the viewer has difficulty in placing the photographs that make up Forest--they could come from anywhere in the tropics--and in identifying, let alone reading, the texts. Gill includes no explanatory wall text in their display; the precise focal distance of the photographs allows the viewer to make out only some of the words on the leaves, adding to the difficulty of that placing. The fact that these aren't "landscapes" per se but close-ups of plants and trees makes the large-scale title "forest" beguiling--there's hardly a forest in sight. It is difficult to reconcile the small scale of these private textual site interventions with their public photographic format and display and their exhibition in various regional locations. What is it about the largeness of these photos against, or amidst, the smallness of these texts? At what moment as we pull away from the photograph does a tree or cluster of trees become a "forest" for us? When do we see the forest for the trees? Gill see ms to be calling into question the moment of scale itself--our prelinguistic apprehension of the world around us. (2) We waver between an intense absorption in these strange text-landscapes and a need to withdraw from them, to take in the larger, encompassing view.

Forest comprises a jostling or conjunction of old and new, nature and culture. Stately, ruined nineteenth-century colonial buildings are captured in the sheer aesthetic finish of black-and-white photography, while lush natural forms rub against soon-to-be-crumbling "colonial" texts by Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad, and Daniel Defoe. Much of the work's aesthetic charge derives not from our perception of the opposition but from the series of reversals between old and new, nature and culture. That opposition or gap is also a linguistic one: the etymology of the word "forest" underwent a gradual shift in meaning between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries from "a waste or unenclosed tract" to "a cultivated area." With the Norman conquest of England in the early eleventh century, the nomenclature "forest," probably deriving from foris, or "outside," replaced the older Latin terms saltus and silva. This etymological shift was associated with a new, more repressive political administration that was imposed on large areas of the English countryside. (3) But if the underlying sense of "forest" is thus of "an outside wooded area," both the reference and the speaker's relative position are ambiguous. When we look at Gill's photographs, for instance, who names, that is, designates, the piece? Where are we standing in relation to this forest? Taking up the word "forest," in other words, involves entering a space of splitting linguistic paths and an ambiguous colonial history. What does it mean to inhabit the space of this linguistic turn or error? (4)