PICTURE/PILLOW/STORY:
pillows, bags, door, floors and bed time stories

In the mid nineties while still working in shelters and hospitals as well as in my studio, I came across hundreds of feather pillows for sale at a local convent that was closing. This began a series of etched metal pillowcases (embedded with video monitors), bags, ruffled tables, beds and other trappings of the domestic environment relocated to extraordinary circumstances and institutions. I still hope to make an entire room filled with soft down pillows in rigid metal pillowcases before I go to sleep permanently. In addition to their metaphorical content in relation to the community-based work I was doing, I began to think much of my work and life are just about finding a place to rest. I am always taking naps in my studio. Many of my most important ideas and images come from that state between waking and sleeping. In between there are always drips dripping, bodies tossing and thoughts of other beds in better times and other places.

Gilmor’s installation titled ‘Bed Time Stories,’ or alternately, ‘Picture/Pillow/Story consists of a narrow door from Gilmor’s now demolished home, covered with sheets of metal and inset with a small television screen. Playing on the television is a loop of video images take from some old home movies Gilmor purchased at a yard sale.

The floor in front of the door is covered with squares of the same sheet metals as the door, etched with pictures and stories by children who were or are patients at the University of Iowa Hospitals at Iowa City. The etched squares display a wide range of emotions and ideas. They are at the very least disquieting. Some are downright disturbing, but most are quite poignant.

For example, one square has these words, written in a child’s hand: “My name is Holly. I had brain surgery. I was very scared. I have been brave. I want to go home. I am a farm girl. I love animals. At the bottom of the square is her etched drawing of a rabbit.

On the gallery walls encircling the etched floor are five framed etched pieces of metal. These images were found in the trash at a school in London where Gilmor was a visiting artist last summer. They are physically tied with chains to small notebooks titled Home Management I, A Letter to the Editor, Letter From Phoenix and Letter From Dublin. These notebooks are resting on pillows that have been covered with etched metal pillowcases.

The overall effect is that of a sort of hospital ward or shelter.

The irony of those two possibilities, notes Gilmor, is that patients are in bed all of the time, and homeless people are always looking for a bed-and both tend to be unhappy about their situation. Further, there are connotations that attach themselves to beds that aren’t always comfortable, that beds in a domestic situation are loaded with meanings. These loaded meanings reflect on the theme of the work, which is dysfunction.

Elliot Nusbaum, Three Artists Offer Art Dreamscapes, The Des Moines Register Arts Section, page 1, October 29, 1995

Waterloo Mid-career retrospective Brochure

In 1990 The Waterloo Art Center and Museum organized a modest mid-career retrospective. Waterloo is my hometown. It was my second exhibition there. The first was an exhibit of fiber related works in 1974. Both exhibits turned out to be somewhat controversial, The first for it’s possibly objectionable embroidered imagery of fornicating cats and the second was alleged to be related to Black Magic and Voodoo by a local outspoken religious conservative. Kathy Darling and David Van Allen designed this brochure.

Metal Notes and Books 1979-2009

For the past thirty years one aspect of my work has involved the transfer of text and images to 36 gauge aluminum sheets. I first used this material (available at craft stores) after encountering silver Greek Icons while traveling in Crete in 1978. There was something familiar and interesting about the material. It was perfectly suited to the shrines like work I was making at the time (see archives). I noticed that you could buy tin “knock-off” icons on the street in Athens, so I went to a Greek Icon maker to find out how the repousse quality was achieved. Basically he was working with a very heavy aluminum for copper foil.

Suddenly I remembered our copper tooling projects in Girl Scouts! I started drawing on the metal and transferring the text from found notes (by tracing the handwriting on the notes). I found the material interesting for many reasons including it’s cultural references (precious, kitsch). It looks hard and cold but is thin enough to be very malleable and easy to draw into. It reminds some of medieval icons or the Milagros on roadside shrines in Central America and in Mediterranean countries, but it also reminds us of tin foil, the stuff in which we wrap leftovers.

Over the years I have developed my own techniques with this material and have used them in workshops during community-based public projects in homeless shelters and hospitals. Often I use the notes in quantity to cover the surfaces of walls and sculptural dwellings. Recently I’ve done another series of artist’s books using this metal with pasta letters glued to the surface.

During the 1970’s and early 80’s, I combined metal repoussé with video, film and photo documentation of my performance tableaux in Greece, Egypt, Asia, and Iowa. A recurrent theme then and now is the questioning of cultural myths about women.

Gilmor’s aims are more far-reaching, and found objects – including notes, shovels, rocks — represent just one element of a project that includes photographs, video and performance. Mixing the mythic and the prosaic, Gilmor is out to mine the resonances or archetypal figures and situations in contemporary worlds. Wall altars seem familiar but just out of reach. Her monumental floor pieces, resembling tombs or gravestones, tend towards more complexity: One has dozens of nude figures with animal heads hammered in relief on its metal surface; another incorporates a small television monitor with a videotaped performance. Both formats evince Gillmor’s fascination with both Christian and pagan – especially early Egyptian – imagery. The recurring figure in many of these works is a woman with the head of a cat derived from an Egyptian Goddess.

David McCracken, “Group Show proves Artemisia’s Insight”, Chicago Tribune Friday Oct 20, 1989 Section 7 page 50

My intermedia installations of the late 1980’s to the mid 90’s combined metal relief and text with video, found objects and collected notes and images from those disenfranchised by homelessness, serious illness, and other contemporary social issues. After living in New York City in 1986, my work began to deal with issues of homelessness and loss of identity. In 1987 I started a long-term collaborative project that began at Federal City Shelter in Washington, D.C., headquarters for the activist National Coalition for the Homeless. I continued this project working in shelters and hospitals in the U.S. and U.K. for a decade.

In workshops and journaling we concerned ourselves with those experiences where object, place and identity intersect. During workshops we created drawings and writings on metal foil, often based on a remembered favorite “place”. This remembered “place” or “space” became the physical manifestation for a spiritual concept or a psychological space one might call “home.”

These hundreds of metal notes became part of installations I constructed in storefronts, community centers, alternative art spaces, hospitals and museums. Like the folk art grottos and roadside shrines I began studying in the 1970’s, these collaborative installations are multi-layered. In large rooms, walls, floors and ceilings are covered in metal notes juxtaposed with found objects, metal books, video and elements such as steam, water and light. The largest of these installations were in storefronts in London, U.K., Davenport, Iowa, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha and The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art and YWCA in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

These workshops and installations were intended to give a voice to the disenfranchised in their own community and beyond. I also hoped to give those participating access to nontraditional art forms and to encourage the use of imagination as a survival tool. All participants were given credit for their work. Any profits went into the project. They usually created one metal note to keep and one similar to it for the traveling installation. Many chose to remain anonymous, but have not been forgotten.

Though my art takes a variety of forms, it is united by my belief that art can help make meaning of one’s experiences. These installations became shrines to the extraordinary nature of “ordinary life.” For me they embody the peculiar, ridiculous and meaningful (less) qualities of everything human.

THANK YOU

I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals in addition to those who participated but have chosen to remain anonymous, but are not forgotten: Federal City Shelter and The National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., Sean Turner, John Minx, Mitch Snyder, The Big Issue, the Delphina Foundation, London, U.K, The Virginia Center for the Arts, The Davenport Museum of Art, especially Director Dan Stetson and artist Lloyd Schoeneman, Quad City Arts, Kate Ridge, Miriam House and John Lewis Coffee House in Davenport, and to Sandra Bullock at Neighborhood Place in The Quad Cities: The Cedar Rapids, Museum of Art, especially then curator Leslie Wright, The Cedar Rapids YWCA, The Madge Phillips Center and Women’s Shelter, The Katharine McAuley Shelter and Women’s Center, Rick Edelman, Mathew Butler, Nathan Peck, and, always, David Van Allen. The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, especially then director Ree Schonlau Kaneko and Gregg Narber board member.

In the late 1980s after working on my first community-based projects with small groups in homeless shelters in New York Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Iowa I needed time alone in the studio to think about how to process what we’d done so far. The long-term vision was to make major public installations showing the work from the shelter and giving credit to all involved. This body of work I call wall frames. I used the old roof torn off my home and related found materials to encase found notes on metal and images from past work. The frames are really the pieces. The shrine turned house turned framing device became more and more related to issues public and private, of identity and dislocation.

By the mid-80’s I wanted to undermine the precious quality of the embossed metal surfaces, so I began to use found materials and old roofing metal with increasingly smaller amounts of the metal repoussé. My concepts remained an investigation of shrine like vernacular architecture and the construction of the self, particularly as related to women in contemporary culture. During a residency In Cortona, Italy in 1986, I found new forms to reference while working in an abandoned grade school studio. Forms either began much smaller or much larger than I had been working. Many of the cross-like forms became so large I could almost inhabit them. They began to take on my proportions as well. I now feel like this was a beginning for my containers for the self series fifteen years later. I continued to combine the distressed metal with video, film and photo documentation of more recent performance tableaux in Italy, Egypt, Asia, and Iowa.

During the 1970’s and early 80’s, I combined metal repoussé with video, film and photo documentation of my performance tableaux in Greece, Egypt, Asia, and Iowa. A recurrent theme is the questioning of cultural myths about women. These shrine-like sculptures are reminiscent of the vernacular folk architecture of rural Greece and Mexico and intended to create a ritualistic ambience not unlike that of some bizarre roadside shrine. In these works I am interested in the construction and deconstruction of myth and in the deeper relationships between myth, experience, and culture. For me these structures and installations functions as shrines to the mythic potential of ordinary life, embodying its most peculiar, ridiculous, and meaningful (less) qualities.

Following the 1976 All-American Glamour Kitty Pageant event and subsequent installations, and paintings, I adopted a cat-masked Isadora Duncan-like altar ego based on my research of ancient imagery associating “the feminine and the feline” with women and goddess archetypes. During the late 1970’s and early 80’s I took students to ancient sites in Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and Italy. There we staged a series of photo tableaux images and live performances. These performances were partially concerned with the construction and deconstruction of myths about women. In these images, the cat-masked ‘goddess’ image often refers to the female psyche as a strong creative force seeking to use art and ritual as a link between the physical and the spiritual, between the conscious and the subconscious, the body and the mind. The performances themselves juxtaposed long still tableaux with periods of frantic gesture and dance as a metaphor for cycles of order and chaos, death and rebirth. Most of the ritual performances were repeated at the same site various times over a five-year period. There is also a peculiar and humorous quality to their melodramas at ancient and contemporary ruin sites. In later work these animal hybrid goddesses also served to parody gender-related roles.

“Gilmor’s aims are more far-reaching, and found objects – including notes, shovels, rocks — represent just one element of a project that includes photographs, video and performance. Mixing the mythic and the prosaic, Gilmor is out to mine the resonances or archetypal figures and situations in contemporary worlds. Wall altars seem familiar but just out of reach. Her monumental floor pieces, resembling tombs or gravestones, tend towards more complexity: One has dozens of nude figures with animal heads hammered in relief on its metal surface; another incorporates a small television monitor with a videotaped performance. Both formats evince Gillmor’s fascination with both Christian and pagan – especially early Egyptian – imagery. The recurring figure in many of these works is a woman with the head of a cat derived from an Egyptian Goddess.”

David McCracken, “Group Show proves Artemisia’s Insight”, Chicago Tribune Friday Oct 20, 1989 Section 7 page 50