Audrey Gillespie
Audrey Gillespie is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland. Currently living and creating in Belfast N.I. Her media include analogue photography, painting and printmaking. Gillespie's themes explore queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety in her current series ‘This Hurts’. Instagram: @artdrey__
My work explores obsession, release and fantasy. Running in circles, building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout the work, in the form of subtext and saturation while I try and snatch fleeting moments before they’re gone, clinging to whatever brings me release. I fixate my anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories creating colour saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for me to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
I document queer youth through my interactions, stumbling around Northern Ireland, driven by a hazy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleared emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form with 35mm format photography, painting and multimedia elements, colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse into a self-constructed personalised fantasy. As a young queer female artist, examining my own existence and the imprints I have made takes place continually throughout my work, as a lingering subconscious echo. Reacting to my intrapersonal conflict I use photography as a way of documenting, validating the existence of my thoughts, with painting and experimental media I address my underlying intrusive thoughts.
Though much of my work is personal, emotional and ties to inner issues, I cannot escape the climate, environment and identity that I exhibit and are influenced by. The decision to open up this extremely personal monologue, now shared with audiences is becoming a strange form of catharsis, creating and displaying outwardly the visual narrative of queer female sadness, mental illness and grievance from Northern Ireland is radical in itself.
Where would you like your work to take you?
I would ideally like it to take me around the globe, to exhibit and connect to new audiences. I'd like my work to take me to places I could capture, new places that I wouldn't otherwise have access to, I'd want my work to invite me into new societies, cultures, new ways of seeing things.
What do you look for when creating an image?
Sometimes I've seen a multitude of things that I want to compress into one photograph, one painting. In other times it's a response to something that I've seen or remembered, I don't feel like I look for one specific thing or theme, though I might have been inspired by one thing, it won't be the same thing I'm chasing after when creating.
Where do you draw inspiration from?
I draw inspiration from memories, personal experiences and naturally other artists.
Can you list a couple other creatives/friends/people you look to for inspiration?
A few people I look to are Megan Doherty, (@megandoherty.photo) Susie Blue, (@susieblueofficial) Elliot Jerome Brown Jr., (@elliotjeromebrownjr) Melissa Spitz (@nothing_to_worry_about) and Josh Kern (@_kjosh)
