Artist Gill Gatfield, lives her days in Whangaporaoa and holds both a Bachelor of Laws, and Masters of Fine Arts from The University of Auckland. She is a multi-media artist working across disciplines and exploring new media and processes in conceptual painting and abstract sculpture.

With a background in policy and law reform, Gill has developed an open, investigative approach to art-making and art practice. Predominantly self-taught, she began exhibiting abstract text and landscape paintings in 1999. Three years later, she gained entry to the University of Auckland Elam Masters programme, studying painting, installation and sculpture.

Gill Gatfield’s practice revolves around ideas of absorption and reflection – being liminal states of transition and impermanence. Her practice involves an overlap and intersection between technical and conceptual aspects where ideas both derive from, and are generated by her chosen media, in literal or metaphorical extensions.

She has three principal materials: grass, glass and diapers. Each of these materials contain an element of flux: from the slow downhill slip and reflection of glass, to the quiet yellowing and absorption of white diapers, and the fast-pace flourish and demise of live grass. Rather than suppress these qualities, Gatfield exposes them in artworks that remain performative, ‘in the making’, and under the influence of multiple contingencies from weather to curatorial care.

In each media, Gill is developing a substantial body of work, with overlapping abstract and geometric themes forming a dialogue of grids, square boxes and circular holes.

headland SCULPTURE ON THE GULF is pleased to welcome Gill Gatfield as an exhibiting artist at next years showcase event. For more information and to see examples of Gill Gatfield’s work, visit her website here

(Bio courtesy of http://www.sanderson.co.nz/artistbiography.aspx?artistid=76)

Tags: Artist, Gill Gatfield, Sculpture on the Gulf

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