Gemma Williams

Gemma Williams is an emerging Australian artist residing in Eora/Sydney.

Her vivid, gestural paintings explore nature and landscape as metaphors for memory and experience, and playfully shift between representation and abstraction, imagination and reality, and the familiar and the unknown.

Her playful approach to art-making taps into the spirit of her childhood in which adventure, nature and art occupied a central role and ignited her imaginative response to colour and form. The colours found in nature serve as a means of communication and inspiration in Gemma’s paintings. Gemma’s most recent body of work was inspired by McKell Park on Sydney's foreshore. Using scale manipulation, representational distortion and vibrant colour combinations, she captures the sensations and perception of place – dusk by the sea, ambient temperatures, time passing, and the many tones, moods and impressions of the landscape.

The process for each work begins with sketch and photographic studies, but the final paintings are driven by memory and imagination. Combining impasto and thin washes of paint, the works feature recurring motifs suggestive of fallen branches, meandering pathways and organic shapes – landscapes distilled into abstract representations of memory and place.

Gemma has a long interest in experimenting with colour and composition, having worked for more than two decades as an Art Director on the leading design, fashion and travel magazines Vogue Living, British Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler. In addition to her painting practice, she has worked across a range of media, including book design, ceramics, drawing and photography.

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