The City of Joondalup is excited to announce Tarryn Gill as the next recipient of the biennial Visual Arts Commission. Gill will develop and make a new artwork for the City’s Art Collection across 2025-26.
Gill (b. Boorloo/ Perth) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, photography, film, drawing, performance and design for theatre. Through art making Gill explores psychoanalytic ideas, bridging the conscious and unconscious, the personal and collective, the contemporary and ancient. Gill’s distinctive theatrical aesthetics, materials and processes are informed by her 20-year background in dance and competitive calisthenics. She draws on these influences as a way to assert the value of the feminine, the personal and the intuitive.
The Visual Arts Commission program, running since 2012, aims to capture the social, urban, cultural or environmental attributes of the City of Joondalup. Gill proposes to respond to the social context of Joondalup, having grown up in the City and participated in local dance and calisthenics for 20 years. Her new work will be a celebration of girlhood and women in sports and arts, continuing her exploration into representations of the female performing body and the artist’s own growth through hypermobility and injury.
Tarryn Gill is the ninth commissioned artist and joins a distinguished list of past recipients including West Australian artists Tony Windberg (2012), Lindsay Harris (2013), Nien Schwarz (2017), Paul Kaptein (2020), Christopher Pease (2021) and Perdita Phillips (2024), international artist Brandon Ballengee (2016) and interstate artist Helen Pynor (2019).
Tarryn Gill is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
Image credit: The artist pictured with her work, Guardians at the Art Gallery of South Australia, 2019. Photo: Paul Steed.