STEPHEN GILL UK, b. 1971

In his series The Pillar (2015-2019), Stephen Gill uses a motion sensitive camera to capture birds in every shape and contortion, swooping and dipping around a pillar placed in the artist’s field.

The artist has long worked on in depth series that explore the settings that surround him, often with a tightly focused, obsessional quality. At times the artist takes experimental approaches to relinquish control of the image, such as using a plastic camera in his Hackney Wick (2004) series. in The Pillar, the artist stepped outside of the process completely to allow his subjects to speak for themselves. He created the setting: he placed two pillars in a vast open field near his home in Sweden - one held his digital camera, the other attracted the birds, which interacted independently with the perch and the machine. The resulting images are gestural, sculptural and active, at once specific and abstract.

The artist is known for his award winning artist books, including the book version of The Pillar, which won the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award in 2019. 

Gill has exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, Foam Museum in Amsterdam, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Haus der Kunst in Munich among many others. The artist’s work is held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Moderna Museet and others.