A showing of works by the Sydney-based publisher founded by artist Simryn Gill and writer Tom Melick.
Stolon Press is a Sydney-based art and publishing collective whose work sits somewhere between art and book, image and text. It is run by the artist Simryn Gill and writer Tom Melick, with the help of an extended family of collaborators.
Its namesake is the stolon, a stem found on some plants that spreads rhizomatically above ground, casting down roots along the way to seed new satellite plants. Gill and Melick’s goal, they have said, is to similarly move “close to the ground,” feeling out neglected spots to create new ideas, and give life to images and texts that “might easily fall through cracks or remain in boxes and bottom drawers.”
Since its founding in 2019, Stolon Press has published eighteen books. Their output includes artists books, short stories, poetry, pamphlets and essay collections. This exhibition brings together most of these publications.
In one vitrine you can find early works like Silver Street and A Machine, a Manual (both 2020), in which Melick and Gill’s statements of purpose are laid alongside photocopied impressions of leaves and petals. Stolon Press produces many of their books on photocopiers, a now somewhat outmoded reproductive technique whose inky, artisanal qualities Gill first began to explore in the 1980s, including here in the Schaeffer Library.
Also included in the vitrine are a set of “pocket books”—short collections of writing by Stolon friends like Lee Weng Choy and the late Aveek Sen. These books, a continuing series, are thin and light, designed to fit into a shirt or back pocket, to be read on a bus, or leaning against a wall during a lunch break.
Reaching out like wings in window displays to either side is Clearing, a large-format folio book produced in 2022. The Schaeffer Library’s two copies have been laid out to show the parallel stories that play out across the book’s recto and verso pages: on the bottom, a rubbing Gill made of a date palm that was uprooted to make way for the new Art Gallery of NSW building; on the top, an essay by Gill with an accompanying image essay annotated by Melick.
Laid out stolonically along the length of the Library, Clearing—like all Stolon Press’s books—throws out a multitude of references, ideas and histories which invite further thinking, writing and discussing. Hopefully some may lead back to the books stacked all around you.
Stolon Press’s extended network of collaborators includes Alexander Robinson, Anca Rujoiu, Andrew Brooks, Anna Polo, Astrid Lorange, Aveek Sen, Catherine de Zegher, Chandrima Bhattacharya, Diane Fortenberry, Elina Alter, Elina Tipikina, Elisa Palacio, Elisa Taber, Emma Capps, Eugene Choi, Geddes & Walter, Graham Maslen, Jane Devery, Jeroen Wille, John Howes, Juan Laxagueborde, Judy Annear, Khaled Sabsabi, Lee Weng Choy, Lilian Chee, Lisa Howes, Mary MacDougall, Robert Milne, Naomi Riddle, Nina Serova, Olindo Polo, Quentin Sprague, Robert Milne, Ruud Ruttens, Simryn Gill, Souchou Yao, Tina Melick, Tom Melick, Tom Polo, Trent Walter, Vaughan Wozniak O'Connor, William Eric Brown, Xenia Cherkaev.
Organised by Nick Croggon, Events and Programs Officer at the Power Institute
The exhibition is on view at the Schaeffer Fine Arts Library in October 2024.
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