Gugan Gill

About

Gugan Gill (b. 1999) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in London and Birmingham.

Gugan’s work delves into capturing the “life story” (Le Guin, 1986), attending to often overlooked South Asian narratives, marginalised histories and changing landscapes. With focus on navigating diasporic and transcultural identities; and the practice of growing and cultivating community – a sense of domestic feminism is woven throughout her work. She attends to the voices of the women in her life, seeking to understand and document the passing down of cultures and heritage.

With a dedication to storytelling, Gugan‘s work documents and preserves histories, using them to inform our practice of everyday life by attending to material culture and domestic settings such as the home, the garden, and local communities. Borrowing and interpreting different tools and methods to support their making – such as the use of Super 8, archival materials, the practice of conversation, and of gardening – Gugan’s practice is informed by her research into postcolonial, queer, and eco- feminist theory.

Within the Practice of Everyday Life, Luce Giard writes –

The sophisticated ritualisation of basic gestures has thus become more dear to me than the persistence of words and texts because body techniques seem better protected from the superficiality of fashion, and also, a more profound and heavier material faithfulness is at play there, a way of being-in-the-world and making it one’s home.                              

“I want my work to embody the importance of paying attention to the everyday, of the wisdom and knowledge hidden within the practice of everyday life, of the life stories that have been marginalised. I aim to always recognise art’s role in shaping our future, understanding our past and affirming our situated experience within the world.”