Gillian’s research emerges from a performance and visual art practice concerned with identity, site and object. Her work considers the embodied and material experience of the uncanny feminine.
Gillian’s art research employs found and detritus materials to prompt new somatic or memory experience. Often, Gillian has been commissioned to respond to the specificities of site or place. Gillian uses her body, voice and movement, informed by Butoh Theatre and European performance art forms. Recent research has included collaboration with clothing designer Dr Phillipa Jackson on the repurposing of found clothing to explore bodily slackness, mass and aging. Gillian is also a participant in ‘Drawing Out Hilbre’, a sited research project for Liverpool Independents Biennial 2025 and BADA, Hilbre Island (Lead Curator Dr Joanna Leah). Gillian devised performative responses to the ecological and gendered history of the island.
Moving forward, Gillian is interested in co-creative processes with artists and non-artists, to create alternative narratives of aging, body, place and agency. She has been leading funding bids to develop new creative work and knowledge sharing around experiences of (peri)menopause. Gillian is looking for new mechanisms for dialogue, how communities communicate sense of place and identity through the shaping of bodies and materials. She invites interdisciplinary connection with agendas of class, home, ecology, non-binary gender, physical and mental ‘fitness’.
For more information go to: www.gilliandyson.co.uk