Through abstraction, Gillian King’s practice explores relationships between perception, connection, and materiality, attending to complexity, tenderness, and care. Working across painting, textile, and sculpture, she creates tactile surfaces in which labour, touch, and time are embedded, and where material becomes a record of attentiveness, repair, and lived experience.

Using natural and synthetic pigments and dyes derived from plants, sediments, rusted objects, and gathered materials, King employs processes such as dyeing, stitching, bundling, stuffing, knitting, and layering. These gestures accumulate through repetition, transforming flat canvases into sculptural reliefs that swell, fold, and press outward. Color seeps and stains unpredictably, while patterns echo the rhythms of natural, celestial, and animal bodies, collapsing distinctions between painting and object, surface and depth.

Abstraction enables the work to remain open rather than declarative. Forms hover between recognition and refusal, suggesting bodies, shelters, wounds, and supports without fixing them in place. Care operates as both subject and method: slow, repetitive processes establish an alternative rhythm grounded in attentiveness, adaptability, and quiet resistance. Influenced by her parallel practice as an art therapist, the studio becomes a space for listening and holding, inviting bodily, haptic encounters and moments of reflection and connection.

Gillian King is a visual artist, art therapist, registered psychotherapist (CRPO Qualifying), and art educator based on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2016) and a Master’s in Art Therapy from the Toronto Art Therapy Institute (2023). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and featured in Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Create! Magazine, and CBC Gem. Gillian has received several awards, including the Espronceda Centre for the Arts and Culture Artistic Prize (Barcelona, 2019), the RBC Emerging Artist Award (2017), and the Nancy Petry Award (2017). Her exhibition history includes Galerie Karsh-Masson, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, PDA Projects, General Hardware, Galerie St-Laurent+Hill, and Nicolas Robert.