INSTANCE
MILLIE PLAYER
July – October 2023
Millie Player is a visual artist whose practice exists within a boundary of drawing, metal sculpture and installation. She lingers over passing moments, making work that looks beyond external measurement, connecting viewers with the duration of their bodies.
This piece developed from a collaboration with her grandmother. When living together they roamed through her old documents, schoolbooks, and fabrics; Player completed observational sketches of this collection. She was drawn to an illustration done by her grandmother as a child – a spidery landscape of the sun, birds and trees: a sketch seemingly identical to the ones all children make. It existed amongst pages containing learnings of handwriting, calculation and sewing patterns where numbers and arrows marked formal progress and activity.
‘Instance’ exists for viewers to follow the flight of a bird. We assume, for a moment, the temporality of its beating wings. Our glance concedes to its glide. In a moment of idleness, we are suspended without measured time.
The work is comprised of metal pieces Player cut from her own drawings, suspended with thread. A background of hand drawn graph paper sits behind, echoing the original schoolbook. Cut into fragments of metal, the drawings warp to the time of the viewer in the strength of their shape. Rather than looking out, one may look within at a bird in flight.
In the shared communal space of a window, the street, memories, connotations and experiences of multiple bodies create a situational time of their own. The viewer becomes a place of passage in the glass.
For more information about Millie’s work see