www.tanyagill.com
Fulbright to India 2011-12

Purchase instructions: email info@fulbright.org with artist name & details of art piece

We are all in a constant state of adjusting, adapting, and remaking ourselves. We do so in order to live with others and to adapt to the world around us. Every adaptation is woven into ourselves, changing us in the process. These adjustments become part of who we are, a revised self. Yet not all adaptations are seamless. Often, they leave an imprint we carry with us. In my work, I seek to visually articulate these imprints. Using darning, or embedded thread, I bring together two different surfaces. Each piece is my attempt to fill a hole or gap in the original material. In doing so, two pieces are joined together to make a unified surface.

In the Altered series my materials are thread and found fabric. In all of the works the fabric is disturbed, yet repaired. In the Altered series a shape is intentionally cut out of fabric, then re-woven. This is an on-going series created between myself and Master Rafoogars (darners) in India. This exchange with Master Rafoogars supports informal artisan labor and plays with ideas of translation/alteration within the process itself. I was introduced to this way of working and to a community of Master Rafoogars in 2013 during my Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship exploring the intersection of contemporary art and craft in New Delhi, India.

In addition to being a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, I have been in residence at McDowell, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and The Ragdale Foundation. I received my BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and earned my MFA in painting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. I describe myself as a process-based artist rooted in the history of drawing and painting. I live in Chicago, IL where I am a Community Artist in Residence at Hyde Park Art Center.