Lisa Sharkey and Stephen Gill at Tiliqua Tiliqua

I met up with Virginia to go along to this show down in Enmore, it was a fine day with plenty of sunshine though afterwards it got a little chill in the wind. The opening was well patronised so there were lots of people there.

There was a stark difference between Sharkey’s ‘Beauty of Impermanence’ show with photos of peonies in close-up, and Gill’s ‘One Story Ends Another Begins’ which is made up of large abstract canvases with a muted palette. 

The speech was given by a woman who knows both artists and who worked at Stills Gallery. I mentioned a project that I did recently while talking with Gill, a man Virginia knows. My story was a bit unhinged and incoherent so I wanted here to put it down in more detail.

In 2008 in the winter I was struggling with my mental health and in order not to stay at home I would go out. One day I got on the train and went into the city taking photos on the way. I went to an opening at Stills Gallery and took blurred photos, inside it was dark (see below) and the walls were illuminated in order to accommodate the works for sale. Then I went out into the streets and deliberately took blurred photos of people (example below).

I’m still proud of these photos I took with my Canon PowerShot A530. I broke the camera after that day but in about 2020 got it repaired because I like the blur effect and more modern models don’t blur. I treasure the camera also because it went on that July journey with me, a month later I would be in the middle of a psychotic episode that lasted two months. In July I was on the cusp of furrowing reality but by Octobe by dint of exercising every day I would have completely recovered.

Stills gallery therefore is a name laden with meaning for me, and I think of it in this light whenever I hear it mentioned as it was on Saturday when I went to Tiliqua Tiliqua. I cannot forget those days and I will always think of peonies and purple when I think of Stills Gallery.

I spoked with my friend Basia about peonies and works featuring flowers because I had my doubts, flowers are such show-offs and I don’t quite get the impermanence thing as they happen every year. I understand that flowers are beautiful but maybe it’s a gender thing, men aren’t into flowers in the same way as women are. 

I was more comfortable with Gill’s abstracts with their big sweeps of purple that look like tubes. I understand that purple has a meaning for Gill, it is the colour of some sort of altered state and I liked the way he went out on a limb and concentrated on one colour, he said he doesn’t normally use purple.