Gillian Adamson
Amidst
8 – 30 November 2025
OPENING/MEET THE ARTIST Saturday 8 November, 11am – 5pm ALL WELCOME
MEET THE ARTIST Saturday 22 November 11am – 2pm ARTIST TALK 1pm
Exhaustion starts creeping in. Work. Tidying the house. Making another dinner that my toddler won’t eat. Sharing the road with impossibly angry Ford Ranger drivers. As I race toward the end of the day, I am more on edge. Crashing over that edge feels inevitable.
In between these waves, my impulse is to reach for my phone and scroll. To embrace mindlessness. But the latest self-promotion, self-optimisation, aura-healing-over-8-10-sessions content only provides me more frustration. I’m undernourished.
Where is the stillness? Where can I be held in quietness? Where do I rest?
This body of work is a search for stillness. A built structure to hold and support oneself. An effort for personal shelter. Making this work has provided me rest amidst the heaviness of life so near the edge. What remains is incidental.
“In Gillian’s studio we talked about the chaos of parenting and the longing for calmness in a fast paced world. In this exhibition we witness Gillian using her studio as a place to create refuge. In the making of these paintings she has mediated on the stillness she is searching for. Although abstract, the paintings allude to empty corners to sit still in, sheer curtains to walk slowly through and get lost in, and labyrinths where we might fall end up in a far away corner of our imaginations. I like these paintings, I want to live in these paintings.” Lottie Consalvo
Q and A
How do you choose your subject matter?
My subject matter is always based in the psychological – making art is first and foremost a way of processing emotions for me. I find inspiration in the monotonous day to day.
Artist Biography
Born in Maitland, 1992, Gillian Adamson is a painter based in Newcastle, NSW. Adamson’s works traverse universal experiences and the idea of the spirit. Her works feel like an intrusion into the most intimate parts of a persons life, but also show the small joys of human existence.
This is her second solo exhibition at Straitjacket.
