“This book is an artwork, too: its pages unfold like leaves, mapping Gill’s inspiring process, thoughts, and references. Anyone interested in art, ecology and being (and their entanglements) should read this book.”

— Trent Walter, Negative Press

“…hums with a compulsive energy that comes not only from the careful busyness of its many components, but from Gill’s apparent drive to capture something in its entirety.”

— Quentin Sprague, The Monthly

“More like a tree than a catalog which I turned page by page, face to face with my face. A book of what I’ve come to call Deep Metonymy.”

— Michael Taussig

“One way to understand clearing is as an act of removal, or erasure. This sort of clearing — as in the clearing of land for development — seeks to eradicate the messy variety of that which already exists in order to impose order and progress.

This book — produced by Stolon Press in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of Simryn Gill’s commission for the Sydney Modern Project — is an alternative type of clearing, one that does not seek to contain and erase, but rather to unfold and unwrap.

This mode of clearing is enacted through words and images. The words take the form of undisciplined anecdotes, just-so stories, and silly questions. The images are rough impressions, rubbings, and a swirling mass of photographs, drawings and photocopies. Their contents are the discarded objects of daily life in the Australian colony — decaying paperwork, fallen date palms, ibises.

Through Simryn Gill’s essay and image sheets, and Tom Melick’s caption notes, the book peels back the packaging of these objects, revelling in the cracks and creases, and revealing their complex interdependencies with the places they inhabit and each other. Catherine de Zegher’s essay ‘Simryn Gill: Tree is a tree is a tree is a tree’ — a booklet within the book — elaborates on these complexities, thinking with trees as a way into Gill’s practice.”

— Nick Croggon