Artists statement

Deanne Gilson is a Proud Wadawurrung woman, emerging Elder, cultural educator and award-winning visual artist from Ballarat, Victoria. Deanne works primarily in painting, fabric/textile design, clay installation and digital imagery. She explores the colonial disruption of her Wadawurrung family, looking at how the male and female gaze has and still does impact her matriarchal women. With an art practice that looks at the objectified, Deanne has found ways to cope with trans-generational trauma through art.
Deanne is the first Wadawurrung artist since colonisation to revive lost cultural knowledge found specifically on her ancestral artefacts, consisting of four marks that define her family. Along with re-telling her mother’s Creation Story and the stories
based on today’s lived experiences concerned with the physical and spiritual experience. Deanne has been developing her multidisciplinary practice in regional Victoria for almost 35 years and has shown across the National Gallery Victoria and the Koorie
Heritage Trust. Post Preston, After the Bushfires, Our Country, Plants and Animals Need Healing is winning work in the 2021 Koorie Art Show.