Lizzie Gill: Menagerie

Baker—Hall is delighted to present Menagerie, Lizzie Gill’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view November 30, 2025 – January 3, 2026 with a public reception Sunday, November 30th from 11—4pm.

In Menagerie, Gill expands her ongoing exploration of domestic life, inheritance, and the intimate theater of interior spaces, drawing inspiration from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Like the play, the exhibition dwells in a space where memory and imagination intermingle. Gill turns the still life into a stage set — a mise-en-scène where cherished objects, animals, and mythic vessels step into the role of actors, holding the weight of unspoken desires, expectations, and emotional inheritance. The resulting paintings inhabit the threshold between the real and the remembered, suggesting how one’s sense of home and identity is shaped as much by illusion as by lived experience.

Gill’s work has long used assemblage and historical reference as a way to complicate nostalgia. In Menagerie, this sensibility deepens. The porcelain pitchers, teapots, and decorative wares that populate her compositions echo the character Laura’s prized glass figurines — delicate, protected, and yet burdened by projection. Birds, lizards, and alligators appear as symbolic stand-ins for longing, yearning, resilience, and escape. Their interactions feel both theatrical and tender, suggesting the layered emotional architectures of family: responsibility, desire, inheritance, and the private space of fantasy cultivated to survive them.

Technically, the works continue Gill’s signature process of material translation. Drawing imagery from museum archives, transferware patterning, and inherited household objects, she constructs each painting as a layered tableau. Marble dust emulsion is piped onto the surface using a pâtisserie tool, forming intricate bas-relief florals and patterning that oscillate between ornament and growth. This tactile surface calls attention to the labor of care: the tending, dusting, mending, passing-down — the often-invisible work of maintaining the emotional and material world of the home. The vessel, as always in Gill’s practice, becomes a proxy for the body: a container for memory, identity, and lineage.

In Menagerie, the still life becomes a psychological landscape. Time stretches and loops; the table is horizon; the floral overgrowth shades into wildness. Gill’s compositions echo the generational complexities embedded in seemingly ordinary things — the way an heirloom can hold both comfort and burden, and how the domestic interior can be a site of both deep intimacy and quiet performance. The paintings do not illustrate The Glass Menagerie so much as they share its central sensation: that memory is not fixed, but continually staged.