Dr Jill Gibbon

Seen Up Close and from a Distance shows new work by women artists based in the North of England. Installation, drawing and film explore aspects of physical, personal and political spaces. Curated by Steph Fletcher.

Exhibition curated by Olivier Cornet sparking public debate about peace security and war.

Activist art exhibition running alongside DSEI arms fair

Talk given as part of Drawing Through Time and Image

Talk given as part of The University of Gloucester Festival

This paper explores the masquerade of respectability in the arms trade. I argue that etiquette has been largely overlooked in social science research about the arms industry because it is aesthetic; it is enacted, performed and displayed. In contrast, methods from art such as drawing and performance are particularly suited to researching the rituals of manners, hospitality and dress.

The Etiquette of the Arms Trade is the first comprehensive collection of drawings by artist Jill Gibbon. Selected from a ten year period, the drawings document the corrupting culture of the world’s largest arms trade shows. The book includes two essays by the artist 'The Etiquette of the Arms Trade' which places the project in the context of the globalised arms industry, and 'Drawing as Reportage' that explores the role of drawing in contrast to photography.

For the past ten years Jill Gibbon has visited arms fairs in Europe and the Middle East by masquerading as an arms trader with a suit, paste pearls, and a sham business. Once inside, she draws and collects complementary gifts. The exhibition explores the etiquette of the arms trade through the drawings, gifts, photographs of her performance, and elements of her masquerade.

This paper concerns a selection of gifts collected from arms fairs, trade shows for military equipment, in Europe and the Middle East. They include stress balls in the shape of bombs, mortars, and grenades; tanks made of foam rubber; a facsimile ammunition shell, hollow, with an orifice so it can be used as a whistle; a condom with the slogan ‘the ultimate protection’; and a toffee with the logo ‘welcome to hell’. We will suggest that the gifts give insights into the way weapons are regarded in the international arms industry. The bomb shaped stress ball does not resemble a contemporary bomb. A black sphere with a string fuse, it evokes a cartoon idea of a bomb. It refers to a bomb as a sign. We know from Saussure that signs have shifting meanings. In an arms fair, bombs also have shifting meanings. They are presented as seductive objects, a focus for personal and state power, international and corporate co-operation, defence, and jobs. In short, they are treated as commodities. It was Marx’s insight that the ‘use value’ of a commodity is eclipsed by its ‘exchange value’. A site of shifting values and meanings, a commodity has a similar status to a semiotic sign. The authors make sense of this in relation to the ‘material turn’ an emphasis on the agency and properties of materials in the arts and social sciences. They also consider what happens when the gifts are appropriated as art, and the extent to which it is possible to subvert their original function, using them to give insights into the arms trade.

Extension of exhibition at Bradford Peace Museum in pop-up venue.

This chapter focusses on a series of complimentary gifts that Gibbon collected from arms fairs in London, Paris, and Abu Dhabi, 2014 – 2020 by masquerading as an arms trader. They include soft tanks, a toffee in a wrapper saying ‘welcome to hell’, a condom with the slogan ‘the ultimate protection’, and stress balls in the shape of grenades, a soldier’s head, and a bomb. Gibbon asks whether the gifts can be appropriated through art to give insights into the arms industry. The bomb-shaped stress ball does not look like a contemporary weapon. A black sphere with a string fuse, it is a symbol for a bomb, a sign. Soft and pliable, it embodies the shifting meanings of bombs in arms fairs as symbols of power, vehicles of profit, objects of exchange. The stress ball epitomises the arms industry’s disavowal of the material impact of weapons. Using Barad’s (2003) concept of materiality as a performance entangled with meaning, Gibbon argues that the gifts take part in the deceptive charades of the defence industry, where the material properties of weapons are disavowed. Gibbon contextualises her method of exhibiting the gifts in relation to the Dada readymade, and Magritte’s Treachery of Images, where spaces of art are used to highlight the material qualities of an object. She considers whether it is possible to use the gifts to reveal the commodification of weapons, or if they have the last laugh.

The Etiquette of the Arms Trade, Research Station, Leeds Beckett University, October 1st – December 31 2017. An exhibition experimenting with methods of displaying notebooks and objects from the project The Etiquette of the Arms Trade, supported by a catalogue, in preparation for an exhibition at The Bradford Peace Museum in 2018.

Gibbon, J. (2015) ‘Hiding in the Light, drawings of the arms trade’ in Sylvester, C. (ed) Masquerades of War, London: Routledge. This chapter discusses the covers I use to get into arms fairs, and the ways they mirror performances of respectability in arms dealing.

Touring exhibition curated by Olivier Cornet exploring peace, security and war.

This article discusses the challenges and potential of drawing as a method of political reportage. Using my experiences drawing at the arms fair Eurosatory 2022 as an example, I focus on a growing industry in ‘less lethal’ weaponry, equipment for repression. This industry is difficult to document because it is so discrete, with tear gas packaged in neat cannisters, riot gear worn by calm-faced mannequins, and sales staff politely welcoming repressive regimes. The problems are compounded by my own participation in the polite performance in order to stay in the event. I explore the potential of drawing to disrupt the marketing.

In Method Meets Art (2015), Patricia Leavy argues for thinking like both a researcher and an artist in order to create socially useful works. Christine Sylvester teams up with visual artist Jill Gibbon to think through one of her drawings and practices that can radicalize art/war consciousness and motivate action. Both authors bear in mind words George Grosz screamed nearly100 years ago: "What does it matter if you spend your time gold-plating the heels of boots or carving Madonnas. People are being shot…” The essay unfolds from a brief remembrance of debates about art and function and considers what it is to think like a researcher-artist (or not, as is often the case in IR war studies and art making) on issues of war. The co-authors then present separate viewpoints on the drawing and end by working together toward a researcher-artist mode of being, doing and thinking about war through art.

Constructing History – reportage drawing and factography; a conference paper presented at the Illustrating History, Valenciennes 4/12/15. This paper uses art history, practice and theory to retrieve constructivist traditions of reportage, and challenge the assumption that an illustrator simply records events.

Gibbon, J. (2017) ‘Drawing the Panopticon’ at the Association of Art Historians Conference, Loughborough 6th April 2017. The paper explored the relevance of drawing in a digital age, and included a re-reading of the Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin debate about realism and politics from a contemporary perspective. Abstract: What value is the most basic drawing technology - a notebook and pen, in the face of C21st surveillance? The development of watching and listening technologies combined with the diversification of the arms industry into security, and the privatization of public spaces has led to a society of the Panopticon (Foucault, 1991). New systems of ‘behavior analysis’ identify any unusual behavior in a crowd including loitering, running and, even, drawing. Meanwhile the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and online social media encourage us to take part in our own surveillance. Using my practice as a starting point, this paper suggests that reportage drawing might offer a way to look back at, document and subvert the surveillance state, while reclaiming public space. Additional examples include John Berger’s altercation with a security guard at the National Gallery, where the act of drawing became a protest against new legislation imposed in the ‘war on terror’ (Berger, 2015). The paper challenges apolitical connotations of representational drawing by returning to mid C20th debates about aesthetics and politics (Bloch et al, 2008). I argue that Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Brecht’s epic theatre offers an alternative approach to representation, particularly in the use of gesture and interruption, and that this might be a starting point for a radical method for a reportage drawing.

n a period of ever increasing modes of capturing, documenting, commenting on contemporary life, society and environment there continues to be a visual presence and use of the illustrated. The exhibition explores the diverse forms of documentary illustrative practice that push and at times transcend perceived ideas and values of what could be considered documentary/reportage forms.

The wars of the past century have been deeply engraved in our cultural memory. One hundred years after the end of the first world war, the exhibition attempts to take a completely new look at the phenomenon of war and violence.

And This Too, Platform Gallery, Belfast November 3rd - 30th 2017 A group show of art using conflict as a central theme, curated by Gail Ritchie. I contributed sketchbooks, photographs, and artefacts from The Etiquette of the Arms Trade. I was part of a panel discussion at the gallery on November 3rd, alongside Dr Des O’Rawe, Queens University, and aritsts Brendan Jamison and Gail Ritchie.

Shock and Awe, Royal West Academy, Bristol 19/07/14 - 17/09/14 I was invited to take part in a group exhibition of war art curated by Paul Gough to coincide with a major show of paintings by John and Paul Nash in the same gallery, and national commemorations of WW1. I included an installation of sketchbooks drawn undercover in arms fairs, a wall sized ‘graphic-novel’ based on the drawings, and gifts collected at these events. My contribution to the exhibition was covered by The Guardian 27/07/14, the BBC World Service 29/07/14, and Al Jazeera 22/08/14 where the drawings were described as giving insights into the culture of the arms trade, and linked to revelations about British and French firms’ deals with Russia. I gave a gallery talk about my work at Art and War: Truth, Propaganda and Protest, with David Cotterell and Dr Grace Brockington at the Royal West Academy 09/08/14.

An exhibition of graphic design, craft and grassroots resistance.

Transcriptor: Illustration and Documentary the Material. James Hockney Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey October 19th -December 2017. A group show exploring drawing as a documentary medium, curated by James Walker, with artists, Veronica Lawlor and Oliver Kugler. I contributed ten sketchbooks and four prints from the Etiquette of the Arms Trade project.