Artist Talk: Gigi Wallace
Gigi Wallace is a Magandjin-based multi-disciplinary artist utilising photographic and sculptural mediums to explore concepts ranging from her identity and feminism to environmentalism and deconstructing orientalist tropes, just to name a few. In our chat, we talked to her about her practice, her inspirations and her views on photography as a ‘dying’ art.
Q: What drew you towards practicing sculpture and photography?
Gigi: I don’t know, it’s so interesting because actually at first coming to this uni I was thinking that I was gonna major in painting, and I think that’s just because it is the thing that I had most accessibility to growing up. When it came round to my second year [at university], I sort of realised that I had this massive interest in making video art and realized that a lot of my paintings are also worked from photos that I take beforehand, which within themselves are quite interesting.
[With] photography [it was] just sort of to see what the vibes were, you know? Video work is an extended form of photo photography, so I just kind of went into both. You can literally take the prompts and you can research anything you want, you can just fucking go crazy with it. And photography...helped me think very literally about all of the components of an image and what can make an image so great, and the way that you present an image...it helps you sort conceptualise things a lot better. Digitally speaking, I think it’s a lot better to be making digital art these days and to have, you know, files of things rather than having to have all of these physical objects.
Q: What concepts and subject matter to you explore within those two creative avenues?
Gigi: I have like a massive interest in nail artistry and like doing nails...I consider that like sort of a branch of sculpture within itself. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the craft of making acrylic nails or making nail extensions and stuff. And then in my photography practice, I look a lot at my heritage for some reason, it always comes up whenever I do things like photography… and surprisingly in my sculpture practice, it hasn’t quite popped up.
Q: There’s been a renaissance for film photography in recent years, being someone that works within that medium, do you think this resurgence will eventually dwindle and everything will turn completely digital?
Gigi: Yeah, I’ve been having this conversation with a lot of other people…because it seems to be that there’s this massive shift from digital to analogue again. I think that it’s just because we’re so oversaturated with all of this digital media. I don’t necessarily think that photography is dying by any means. I think it’s becoming like the new painting in terms of how accessible it is. Like everybody has a phone, everybody has a camera at this point and if you don’t, you can just walk into an op shop and find one. I think even photography itself isn’t the biggest…most popular thing. There’s still all of these photographic processes that…I’ve been seeing on the internet [that] have been picking up as well, like using photosensitive chemicals like cyanotypes.
Q: Who would you kind of name as your like artistic inspirations?
Gigi: Maisie Cousins, she is the biggest inspiration to my life. She’s only like a decade older than us. I found her in 2015 and she’s like a pioneer of like Tumblr artistry. And she just makes these really, really gorgeous, really colourful, like almost abject grotesque type photos. In terms of other artists…I was a bit obsessed with Mondrian’s paintings, actually, which a lot of people might consider very boring. I really liked the sort of abstract dilemma he had in terms of wanting to abolish the foreground and the background and put everything on the same plane but pattern recognition in the eyes just don’t allow for it and I think that’s such an amazing thing.
Connect with Gigi at
@derpothings on Instagram.