Ann Gillespie

Ann Gillespie is an emerging Australian contemporary artist living and working on Kaurna

land in Adelaide. Ann’s practice is shaped by lived experiences of care, both as a mother

to a child with disabilities and through supporting relatives in voluntary assisted dying.

These intimate histories cultivate a material and ethical sensitivity that underpins her work.

Working across sculptural ceramics, installation, and performance, Ann explores the

intersection of materiality and relationality. She works increasingly with unstable materials

such as raw clay, using material behaviour to communicate states of dynamic flux as forms

yield, collapse, and re-form. Through participatory approaches, Ann’s work foregrounds

interdependence and porous boundaries, inviting audiences into relational states where

witnessing and acting coexist and ethical tensions surface.

Following a period of caring for her uncle, who accessed voluntary assisted dying earlier

this year, Unseen/Undone explores the realities of unpaid care and the feminised domestic

labour that sustains life yet remains unseen. Using raw clay as a proxy for the body, the

material performs durational cycles without resolution. Visitors are invited to participate by

removing a piece of clay clothing and placing it into the laundry bucket to soak. This

simple gesture implicates the audience in the ongoing cycle of care, mirroring the quiet,

repetitive acts that structure everyday life yet so often remain unnoticed.

Throughout the exhibition, the clay gathered in the bucket is continuously reworked by the

artist into new clay garments. This ongoing transformation reflects the relentless,

cumulative nature of unpaid care, labour that renews itself even as it exhausts. The basket

is never empty, embodying the perpetual return of tasks that sustain others while

remaining largely unseen.