Audrey Gillespie

Audrey Gillespie (b.1998) is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland and is currently based in Belfast N.I. Her media include analogue photography, painting, printmaking and other experimental practices in film, embroidery and textiles. Gillespie's themes explore queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety through her series titled 'This Hurts'.

Gillespie has been awarded Best Emerging Artist by AVA festival granting an artist feature in Dazed Digital. She was shortlisted for Vogue Talent 2019 where she met with Edward Enninful at Vogue House, coming in 2nd place. She won public vote in ‘Fine Art/ Photography’ with i-D x Arts Thread’s Global Design Graduate Showcase 2020, was nominated by Photo Ireland to join the FUTURES Photography platform (2021 selection) and graduated in 2020 with first class honours in Fine Art Ba Degree from Ulster University, Belfast School of Art. In 2022 she has since become a selected artist take part in 'New Irish Works' with Photo Ireland and in 2022 has exhibited in the Crawford Gallery, Cork, Dublin Castle as part of Photo Ireland Festival 2022 and in Common Market, Belfast. She is currently exhibiting with Belfast Exposed Gallery’s ‘Street View’ alongside Martin Parr’s exhibit ‘Parr’s Britain’ and in the Preus Museum Norway with exhibition ‘Queer Editons, Performing for the Camera’.

Gillespie’s upcoming exhibitions are to be held in in Seen Fifteen Gallery with a solo show of ‘This Hurts in in Peckham, opening on October 7th and with Photo Ireland as part of New Irish Works held in The Library Project, Dublin in February 2023. Gillespie has been published in 52-Contaigion 2018 & 87-Not At Home 2022 by Abridged N.I, by WerkHaus #2 ‘Still life 2021, by Over journal (Photo Ireland) in 2021 and had her image ‘GINA’ featured as the cover of Anna Burns ‘Milkman’ French Edition 2022 published with Gallimard Editions and Folio.

Project Title: This Hurts

‘This Hurts’ documents intimacy, fragility and existentialism with a queer lens through my own personal interactions. Stumbling around Northern Ireland and driven by a foggy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleared emotions centred around lesbianism, alt-cultures and grief. Using lo-fi analogue techniques to create an unpolished form, colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse into a self-constructed personalised fantasy. Examining my own existence and the imprints I have made takes place continually throughout my work, as a lingering subconscious echo. 

I’m trying to understand why I desire to live through other things; masquerading myself as others; the idea of the perfect or desired other, bleeding my persona into theirs as they do onto mine in-front of my lens. A frustrating narrative of picking up the trails of where self-identity begins and a false self ends rings through my work, set to the theme of a still-torn contemporary Northern Ireland where the country’s history is muddled and its relationship with queerness is even more tragic. This intimate series, presents the visual narrative of queer female anger and identity while pairing fleeting moments of youth, embrace and liberation together to create tender environments with an often-bitter aftertaste.

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