Simryn Gill’s series of prints have been created using collected lumber, washed up on the shores in her vicinity. Weathered and degraded by exposure to the sea and the sun, they bear traces of their origins, as parts of oars or ships, and of their journey, becoming part of the ecosystem of the waves, encrusted with organisms and microbes that eat away at them. Gill has inked and pressed these pieces of found wood onto a collection of papers that encompasses wage records, star charts, accounting ledgers, and reference books sourced in junk shops, markets, and the internet. In doing so, she entangles the different drifts of these pieces of wood, tracing the rise and fall of markets, as well as human and celestial movements to create images of histories adrift. The accompanying photograph catches a glimpse of the edge of a cargo ship, the backbone of a global trade system that is now facing dark and stormy forecasts. Gill’s work also opens up references to the circulation of artistic languages and technologies of woodcut and woodblock printing, which have accompanied routes of trade and knowledge from their Chinese point of origin for more than a millennium.

Works in the exhibition: Pressing In # 44 (2015), monoprint, ink on ledger paper, four sheets, each 31 × 85 cm, 164 × 85 cm combined; Sweet Chariot (2015), gelatin silver print, 160 × 82 cm; Pressing In # 15 (2015), monoprint, ink on ledger paper, six sheets, each 35 × 101 cm, 210 × 101 cm combined; Pressing In # 77 (2015), monoprint, ink on book pages, eight sheets, each 22.5 × 30 cm, 90 × 60 cm combined. Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles