The Pillar
After presenting The Pillar at the Biennale Images Vevey in 2020, Stephen Gill revisits and adapts the series for Images Gibellina. In this project, the artist places a simple wooden post beside a field in southern Sweden, offering birds a tiny perch and photography an unexpected stage. Across the seasons, a motion-triggered camera records fleeting appearances: awkward poses, outstretched wings, bodies caught mid-gesture. Against a flat, repetitive landscape, each bird introduces a moment that will never be repeated. Gill reveals a tension between cyclical time and the singularity of every life. Through the radical simplicity of the setup, a modest element of the landscape becomes a site of attention, where each flutter carries the quiet mark of the miraculous.
The Pillar
Blending documentary, poetry, and ingenious invention, Stephen Gill’s images defy the confines of wildlife photography. The device created for his The Pillar series is as minimialistic as it is clever: The random movement of birds triggers a stationary camera installed in the midst of the Swedish countryside to photograph a wooden pillar on which these birds can perch for a while. The absence of the photographer, the automated process, and the short distance between the camera and the perch provide a very unusual and unpredictable way of capturing birds on film in their natural environment. This British artist thus offers spontaneous snapshots where the birds themselves become the authors of spectacular self-portraits. Images Vevey is presenting this installation in a field to recall the original context in which these pictures were taken.
Coexistence
For his Coexistence series, Stephen Gill photographed residents in Dudelange, Luxembourg, after dipping his camera in the water basin of a former ironworks. The water created a blurry filter on his lens, symbolically injecting the town’s industrial past into his prints. Arranged around a fountain in Vevey, the images were lacquered with hydrosensitive varnish, following a prototype created in collaboration with Bachelor students in Industrial Design at ECAL. The images only revealed their content when in contact with water, thus visitors had to splash them, a gesture that recalls the gelatin silver process. As the large pictures dried under the sun, they became opaque again, until the next festivalgoer came along.
