Biography
Millie Gillespie (b. 1999, London) is a contemporary painter based in Perth, Western Australia. Drawing on her professional background as an architect and her education in both architecture and fine art, she creates 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 pared 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, and 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.
In 2025, Gillespie created over 40 new works and exhibited more than 60 paintings across a series of solo and group exhibitions, including Stillness Within, Inner Landscapes, Synesthesia — The Scent of Colour and Contemporary Women — Western Australian Voices in Art. Her work is represented by Yallingup Galleries and is presented internationally through Artsy, through which a significant number of these paintings have entered private collections in Australia and abroad, marking a period of quiet expansion and consolidation within her practice.
She holds an MSc in Architecture from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland, where her studies focused on memory, materiality, and expressive drawing as a bridge between architecture and art. Her professional journey spans Switzerland, Italy, and Australia, and includes experience in architectural research and design, heritage preservation, writing for international and local design publications, as well as buying, retail design, and visual merchandising within high fashion. This diverse and immersive background, rooted equally in the technical and the expressive has profoundly shaped her artistic voice.
Now into 2026, her practice continues to evolve through both solo projects and collaborative, design-led ventures. Her upcoming exhibition is a group show at Yallingup Galleries, titled Confluence.
