Painting

Gemma Williams

Gemma Williams is an emerging Australian artist based in Sydney, known for her vivid and gestural paintings that use nature and landscapes as metaphors for memory and experience.

Artist Profile

Gemma Williams is an emerging Australian artist based in Sydney, known for her vivid and gestural paintings that use nature and landscapes as metaphors for memory and experience. Her work seamlessly blends representation and abstraction, imagination and reality, inviting viewers to explore the familiar and the unknown. Gemma’s art draws heavily on the colours found in nature, which serve as both inspiration and a form of communication.

By manipulating scale, distorting representational forms, and employing vibrant colour combinations, Gemma captures the sensations and perceptions of place—such as dusk by the sea, ambient temperatures, and the shifting moods of the landscape. Her interest in experimenting with colour and composition is informed by over two decades of experience as an Art Director for prominent magazines like Vogue Living, British Vogue, and Condé Nast Traveler.

Gemma holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School and a Bachelor of Visual Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her years in magazine design and collaboration with photographers have sharpened her understanding of colour, composition, and aesthetics, leading her to transition from publishing to painting for a more visceral form of expression.

In 2023, Gemma’s talent was recognised with the Harvey Galleries National Art School Exhibition Prize and the COSO Architecture Landscape Prize. Her work has been showcased in group exhibitions at .M Contemporary Darlinghurst, Harvey Gallery, Ditty Wheels, the National Art School, and Waverley Woollahra Art School, and it is held in private collections throughout Australia.

Artist Interview

What medium do you work with, and why have you chosen them?

My painting are a combination of thick and thin applications of paint, different intensity and quality of brush stroke is used to describe form and light.

How does your artwork get from initial concept to exhibition stage?

The process for each work begins with sketch and photographic studies, but the final paintings are driven by memory and imagination. Combining impasto and thin washes of paint, the works feature recurring motifs suggestive of fallen branches, meandering pathways and organic shapes – landscapes distilled into abstract representations of memory and place.

Can you tell us a little more about your creative working environment/studio?

I work out of my studio at home. When I'm not there I spend time sketching, taking photographs and travelling. These sketches help to inform my paintings.