Tanya Gill is a multimedia artist and educator whose work explores collapsing environments, adaptation, and restoration through object making, painting, drawing, video and fiber. Material investigation is central to her practice; she is invested in material properties, limitations and context. Gill constructively plays with material limits and combinations, drawing out new meanings. Her work shifts between the political, social and personal realms, endeavoring to visually articulate and reverberate feelings that we all share.
Gill has been a Fulbright-Nehru scholar, as well as in residence at MacDowell, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and The Ragdale Foundation. She received a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and earned a MFA in painting at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Gill calls Northern California, Northern India, and Chicago home. Currently she is nestled in Chicago, IL where she is a Community Artist in Residence at Hyde Park Art Center.
“My work articulates shifts born out of adjusting, repairing and remaking. The main catalyst for the work is my own health. I have a chronic blood condition which leaves me with a heightened sense of the precarious. I have, and will in the future, suddenly need to drastically change or abort plans due to my condition. This sense of living in precarity is by no means unique to me, it is a part of our collective story. We all experience traumatic events which change our course, demanding that we repair and remake ourselves. I am interested in visualizing how the moment we are called to change feels, and what mending the pieces back together might look like.
In all my work I strive to make a space in which we can feel and recognize parts of our collective story; a space where we catch glimpses of our ability to mend, adapt and absorb change.”
At MacDowell in 2002, Tanya worked on furthering her paper cut out work, which uses shadows and reflective light.
