I am drawn to images and objects that come from another era and which arouse nostalgic feelings and notions of romance and desire. Collecting these found images and objects becomes a starting point for making the work. They are often discarded, left on the street or given away. They are in different states of disrepair; faded, musty, dented, chipped and torn. I then begin to undo them, taking them to pieces, cutting them out and newly reassembling them; feeding them into each other to create domestic hybrids. Tensions between desire, loss, humor and the body are played out through the surreal marriage of these materials and images.
The work draws upon surrealist aesthetics and symbolism. It begins as an unconscious playing with materials but as it develops, its meanings are drawn out through these new dialogues and resonances. I am intrigued by the female archetypes that exist within fairytales and Greek mythology; the protector, destroyer, sexual, maternal, vulnerable and the masquerading. In many of the works these archetypal qualities lie next to each other unraveling paradoxes.
These hybrids appear as both props of domesticity and as human form, in particular the female form. I am interested in juxtapositioning the desirable and the sexualized with the familiar everyday. Placing these elements together allows the viewer to peer pleasurably as they are surrounded by the familiar, yet at the same time they are unsettled. In some of the works, by seeing their own and others reflections peering back at them. In others the viewer has to bend down to see the work putting themselves in a vulnerable position and in others they are confronted by a self mocking humour in the work.
Rebecca Fortnum writes on the work �Gillham�s work looks quite refined�, yet there are hints of the prosthetic, of a body displaced and replaced. The customized second-hand furniture absorbs the images pinned to them. Excised from another context and era these reproductions seem carefully selected to resonate nostalgic feminine luxury; (in To lie next to you 2008) a stone carved head with undulating waves of hair, the exterior staircase of a stately home, a ceramic rose with petals edged in gold. What unites these images is the way they suggest a shift between material states, poised to spring, Pygmalion-like, to life. Using the slightest of means, Gillham debases these elegant, reserved, sexualized images by forcing them into a complex relation with the unloved, everyday, cast-off objects on which they are positioned.�
Taken from �The pleasure�s all mine� Press release 2008
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