Graham Gillmore, whose work is always interested in the materiality of forms and letters, uses text in his work to examine the significance of both the act of painting, as well as the viewer's experience in that act. Gillmore has approached language as a corporeal entity, a medium with a distinct physicality that generates random (rather than fixed) meaning and its poetics.

In his new pieces, Gillmore continues to draw from a variety of sources from common culture: to take ideas and cliches from our everyday world. There is often a juxtaposition between the permanence of the words' strong physical presence in the wood, and the questions inherent in the text itself. The text emphasizes the elusive nature of the act of painting, as well as Gillmore's own ubiquitous spins on failed seductions and vulnerable emotional states. His groupings of text - taken variously from Harlequin romance novels, porn magazines, popular music that he himself has written, literature, as well as his own journal and musings, operate on a metaphoric level, alluding both to the difficulty of processing the massive amounts of useful and useless information we are bombarded with, and the ultimately fragmented and sometimes disconnected nature of human experience that we are faced with.

Gillmore frustrates the viewer's expectations by mocking any lingering aspirations that a work's meaning and greater significance will be unequivocally evident in the conventional sense. The viewer's needs to have his/her demands met by the painting in the traditional way are frustrated, as the language leads to a sense of indeterminacy and chaos. The viewer's job then becomes intensified: we must decipher these words and forms through their constituent layers, and recognize the difficulty of determining a fixed meaning. Gillmore is bringing to the surface interpretive complexity, thereby calling art theory and the process of looking at and critiquing a painting into question, while also making a comment on the nature of human experience in the complex contemporary world.