Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill: M*****

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, M*****. Installation view at Mercer Union, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. Photo: Vuk Dragojevic.

In the first few frames of Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill’s cameraless projection M***** (2023), an opening begins to form. Emerging from a red-speckled background made from blackberry dye, the hole is small at first. Its aperture grows larger frame by frame—its edges rough and raw—until it takes up half of the space of the projection. Like a bodily orifice, the chasm burgeons then crescendos, gaping wide, completely engrossing the viewer. Eventually, the opening begins to shrink, narrowing until it finally closes. The experience is visceral, like witnessing a birth. Then, the film loops and the opening begins to form anew. 

Meanwhile, a second cameraless projection loops on an adjacent screen. Made from hair that Hill collected from family members, the moving image produces lines that thicken and thin. At times, several strands span across the screen, running alongside each other. At other times, the strands intertwine, becoming one. Projectors for both films sit atop two stacks of chairs draped in casual, unfussy clothing belonging to the artist and her mother, becoming bodily forms.

The cyclical films serve as the backdrop for Hill’s solo exhibition M***** at Mercer Union, an artist-run center in Toronto. While the exhibition’s title—a silenced hum—points to the devaluation of feminine labour and childrearing, it could also allude to its magical unknowableness. Drawing from personal experience, Hill’s work reflexively connects to the lineage, rituals, and tactilities of motherhood. Employing domestic and organic materials, Hill provides a space to explore the expansiveness of this state of being. 

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, M*****. Installation view at Mercer Union, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. Photo: Vuk Dragojevic.

Like sentient bodies standing akimbo, two structures made of disassembled umbrella frames spread across the footprint of the gallery. Images—which include details from photographs of Hill’s own birth intermixed with cutouts from magazines of spores, parasites, larvae, eggs, chrysalids, and animal and plant babies—hang from mobile-like protrusions. While the contents of the photographs are not immediately accessible, they convey an overall sense of bodily squishiness—their affect ranging from sweet to fleshy to carnal to grotesque. Alongside these images, on the mobiles of Site Parasite Dice Paradise (2023), Hill affixes a spider cocoon as well as strawberries, which fill the gallery with a subtle sticky, syrupy scent. Over time, the berries ripen, spawning new life in fermented fungal forms. Photographs of Nadya Suleman are added to Hill’s second sculptural figure. Suleman, a single mother who conceived via IVF and gave birth to octuplets in the early 2000s, was widely derided by American media during her pregnancy. In Octom** (2023), her cutout images smile back at the viewer as they dangle and sway in collusion with the movement of beings in the gallery. 

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, M*****. Installation view at Mercer Union, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. Photo: Vuk Dragojevic.

Fade-out (2023), a work Hill created in collaboration with her daughter after a day of blackberry picking, also features jewel-like cutout photographs. Their organic forms scatter across a fabric backdrop like planets in an infinite cosmos. Fade-out is one of six works on silk tissue dyed in blackberry ink. Across the series, the natural dye swirls unevenly across the fabric. In places, it expresses itself in a candy pink; in some, a deep bruised purple; in others still, it clumps together forming dense clots, palpably corporeal. Hill’s inclusion of blackberries, a non-native species transported from England to so-called Canada, implies further unspoken terms: m***** land, m***** lode, m***** earth, m***** tongue. It also evokes the tender and attentive slowness of hand harvesting and gathering, of intergenerational knowledge transmittance, and of togetherness in collaboration with nature’s abundant fertility. 

Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, M*****. Installation view at Mercer Union, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. Photo: Vuk Dragojevic.

To mother is to be in alchemy with the universe to generate lifeforce. How then, could its volumes be contained with language? Rather than trying to force the term into rigid depictions or false binaries, M***** hints at something tacit and primordial. Translating feeling into matter, Hill proposes an experience of motherhood that eschews Western capitalist and colonial conventions in favour of an expansive inquiry of its embodied understanding. Mother is many things: it is corporeal, it is generative, it is monstrous, it is shelter, it is site. Hill’s exploration eludes a singular paradigm.

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