Wanda Gillespie is an Australian/New Zealand contemporary artist based in Auckland. She uses sculpture and photography to explore fictions and ideas around history, culture, ritual and ceremony. Her sculptures are often presented as historical artefacts.
Wanda’s work combines finely detailed sculpted or carved elements with more abstracted and organic forms. Her figurative sculptures are primarily carved in wood, and may interact with other beings, human or spirit. An interest in the mystical, paranormal spirit world is central to her work.
Wanda questions the nature of reality through narrative, as her installations are often accompanied by short fictions, using real and invented historical facts to create slippages in linear space/time. This disruption is followed through in her works where traditional craft techniques such as wood carving, are used in contemporary ways.
Since graduating in 2009 from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, with a Masters of Fine Arts by Research, First Class Honours, Gillespie has exhibited regularly with recent solo exhibitions including Higher Thinking, Vivian Gallery, Higher Thought Forms, Sanderson Contemporary , Levitation Practice, MARS Gallery, the Ceremonial Processions of Dreamers, Lindberg Galleries, the Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland, Craft Victoria and Fehily Contemporary, Into the Void, Linden Contemporary Centre for the Arts, and Tana Swiwi, Westpace, Melbourne. She has been funded through Australian Arts Council, Arts Victoria, and the City of Melbourne for her solo projects, has taken artist residencies in Indonesia through Asialink and was artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gillespie has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Art and Australia Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award in 2014.