Minka Gillian

About the work

Gillian presents a suite of small and medium-scale sculptures (2019-2025) constructed from recycled and repurposed industrial materials using a variety of weaving, binding, and assembly techniques. Cable ties become flagella, nashi pear backing sleeves become cell walls, but in the infinite detail of these sculptures we can zoom in even further to think of the incomprehensibly tiny systems such as kinesin and dynein motor proteins, whose microscopic movements are essential to almost every cellular process. These familiar materials shift between the manufactured and the biological, encouraging us to see industrial waste as something active, adaptive, and alive. The works draw attention to the often invisible structures that sustain both natural and manufactured worlds, reminding us that the smallest systems are often the ones that make life possible.

Images

About the artist

Minka Gillian is a multidisciplinary maker living and working on Darkinjung country on the NSW central coast. Gillian transforms the overlooked materials of packaging, protection, and transport into intricate sculptural forms. Working with woven plastics, fruit nets, cable ties, and protective coverings, her practice blurs the boundaries between industrial manufacture and biological life. Through repetition, weaving, and accumulation, these everyday materials become enlarged, organic structures that evoke microscopic organisms, their forms suggesting cilia, flagella, cellular membranes, and other biological systems.