Biography

Millie Gillespie (b. 1999, London) is a contemporary painter based in Perth, Western Australia. Drawing on her professional background as an architect and educational background in both architecture and fine art, she creates large-scale abstract works that explore the delicate balance between structure and spontaneity.  Gillespie’s paintings unfold through processes of layering, erasure, and gestural mark-making. Her compositions are paired back and atmospheric, often grounded in a restrained palette of closely related tones.

At the heart of her visual language are hues of blue and green—colours that carry deep emotional resonance in her work. Rather than referencing the sea or sky directly, they act as containers for feeling: quiet expressions of contemplation, longing, and memory. These tones become a kind of inner landscape—
fluid, 
      expansive, 
		and gently unresolved.

For Gillespie, painting is a way of giving form to the intangible. She is drawn to surfaces that feel worn and lived-in, to moments of stillness, to spaces that exist somewhere between clarity and ambiguity. Her work invites the viewer to pause and enter a state of quiet observation, where feeling takes precedence over form.  

She hold's a Masters in Architecture from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland, where she focused on memory, materiality, and expressive drawing as a bridge between architecture and art. Her professional journey spans Switzerland, Italy, and Australia, and includes work in architectural research and design, heritage preservation, writing for both international and local design publications, as well as buying, retail design and visual merchandising for high fashion. This diverse and immersive background - rooted in both the technical and the expressive has profoundly shaped her artistic voice. Today, her practice reflects this rich foundation, evolving through solo projects and collaborative, design-led ventures.