Nite Art Art across Melbourne
Kylie Stillman
At the heart of the exhibition is a consideration of the nature of things and how we navigate and articulate the world around us. Making use of overlooked and discarded books, her work responds to the physical parameters and possibilities embedded in everyday objects. Rather than reinterpret these, Stillman uses a seamstress’s sensibility to unravel and remake, something she inherited from her mother’s aptitude for resourcefully uniting fabric off-cuts into unique wearable items. Stillman takes a period of months on her works, meticulously slicing each page with a scalpel in a kind of excavation whereby the strata of paper slowly reveal the final form in negative space, affirming her concerns about humankind’s interaction with nature from a conceptual and physical perspective.