Ann Gillespie: Unseen/Undone
Opening event: Tuesday 23 June, 6 - 8pm
Recently awarded the Helpmann Academy Major Exhibition Award 2025, 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 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.
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 last 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.