Simryn Gill: Paper Jam / Insider Trading

This exhibition includes two new works produced by Simryn Gill as part of her residency at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library in 2024-25. This program highlights the work of contemporary artists whose practice is grounded in research, and is designed to open the Schaeffer Library’s unique and rich collection to new exploration and experimentation.

Simryn Gill: About the Works

Insider Trading (2025)

Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote an open letter in 1905 to chiefs in the Kandyan highlands of Sri Lanka, complaining about the lack of skill in their efforts at renovating old Buddhist temples and monasteries. 

In repainting viharas nowadays the chief errors lie in the bad colours used; … I say bad colours because the old way of making colours has been given up, and with it all restraint in the use of colour, so that where a few colours only were once used … the painting now displays all the colours of the rainbow.*

Coomaraswamy’s own writings are like crumbling temples. He pines for the lost arts, ways of making and thinking which honour anonymity, and the profound skill of craftsmen in their guilds whose repetitious labour made objects and monuments across many lives and lifetimes. Ever since I came across that small admonishing essay I’ve wondered about good colours. Where to find them, how to know when you’re in their presence. 

“Will my taste pass the test?” This is a kind of insider question I pull out and put on the table when I roll inks or squeeze colours out tubes. 

*Ananda Coomaraswamy, "An Open Letter to Kandyan Chiefs," self-published pamphlet, 1905 (reprinted from the Ceylon Observer of 17 February 1905).

Paper Jam (2025)

The machines that were for so long invisible labourers in the business of writing, image-making and reproduction, are now, in their demise, being seen for themselves as objects. Inert and beautiful. 

For several years I have been making records of these machines by wrapping them in paper and taking impressions of them by rubbing graphite and crayon over them. These have included typewriters, cine and still cameras, and photographic enlargers. 

This work is a graphite rubbing of the black and white Ricoh photocopier used by Stolon Press (the experimental publisher run by Simryn Gill and Thomas Melick), which we have used to make numerous books. 

The residency is made possible by a generous individual gift to the Power Institute.