Still lives

Object 6: The object as status

In Still Lives Pearl Gillies presents two works, 20/20 Vision, a tea cup and saucer, and Spooning, a heavily ornate gilded teaspoon. Both of these works manipulate scale to interrogate and destabilise the status of the objects' viewer.

Gillies' objects are highly ornate. The cup shines whiter than white, with a gold handle of intricate detail and gold rim, and the spoon also is gold and heavily decorated with moldings and filigree. The initial reading of these objects is as being of high standing, of wealth and social position. Such ornamentation and finish is reserved for objects used in the most important of occasions, or by the most important of people.

But consideration of the actual, physical use of Gillies' objects immediately reminds the viewer of their scale - these are certainly no ordinary cup, saucer and spoon. To hold Gillies' teacup in one's hand turns a regular sense of scale - always using the body as its initial referent - into a nonsense. The viewer is denied a position of transcendence over the objects, and is relegated to a lowly status which is accentuated by the presentation of the objects on a high plinth. The monumental scale of the objects denies the viewer access as their regular user: these objects belong to another, more powerful hand.

• Pearl Gillies
• Right: Spooning 2001
• Copper, brass, nickel silver, enamel, gold plate
• Left: 20/20 Vision 1998
• Powder coated aluminum, brass, 23 carat gold leaf

Employing the spatial tropes of Alice's experiences in Wonderland and Gulliver's in Brobdignag, Gillies playfully inverts the relationship of viewer to object. While Gillies' work is rich with literary references to the gigantic, worlds where the reader of a written text ultimately remains the agent/giant, in Gillies' work, the viewer's status is uncertain. The viewer of Gillies' description of the gigantic has a status that oscillates between gallery-goers and tiny captive.

And considering the surface of Gillies' objects closer, as the title 20/20 Vision encourages, imperfections in the surface and manufacture of the objects become apparent. Are we now seeing the objects at high magnification or as an extreme close-up, a mode of viewing made readable by our familiarity with the televisual or filmic text? And with this fluctuation in scale the viewer's agency is restored. From this viewpoint the cup assumes the proportions of an item of furniture, and the spoon becomes a digging implement - an ornate spade or shovel. The object as an identifier of status is a relative and shifting referent.

• Al Munro
• From the catalogue essay Of lives and objects still
• March 2004

• Pearl Gillies
• Front: Spooning (detail) 2001
• Rear: 20/20 Vision (detail) 1998

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