Wanda Gillespie
Wanda Gillespie plays with space, memory and time as she transports the viewer to an imagined or alternate future in 'Levitation Practice'.
At first glance the carefully carved wooden sculptures, wrapped in fur seem to be artefacts that hark back to a time of cavemen. They are a type of artefact, however Gillespie has imagined them to be artefacts of the future.
Pulling on your imagination and your grip of time is exactly what Gillespie intends to do. Playing with fiction, in her artist statement she outlines, “a visual representation of mystical practices, Levitation Practice uses wood carved figurative sculptures to instruct ‘seekers’ on a possible path for transcendence from the physical to spirit worlds. The exact historical creation of these figures is uncertain. Many speculations point to their being from around the 2160s, a time of great spiritual enquiry and reflection, when survivors commemorated 80 years since the colossal environmental disaster of 2083 that saw most of the earth’s human, animal and plant life extinct.”
Whilst grounded in time by their material nature, and situated in the Asia Pacific regions due to the specific plant life from Australia and New Zealand, the use of wood and fur imbues the objects with great spiritual significance.
Levitation Practice is the artist’s own ritual that she invites you to. In presenting artefacts from a future time, Gillespie invites the viewer to explore the possibility of alternate realities where all exists simultaneously and time is mere illusion.
Opening Thursday 29 September, join Gillespie as she explores and challenges fictions and ideas around history, culture, ritual and ceremony.
EXHIBITION
Wanda Gillespie | Levitation Practice
29 September – 15 October
MARS Gallery, Melbourne
Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne.
No artist creates in isolation. Every painting carries traces of the conversations, places and histories that shaped it, preserving within its surface a particular moment...
The weekend markets at Fairfield Showground have been one of Western Sydney’s great institutions for more than fifty years. Fresh fruit and vegetables, children’s clothes,...
In recent times, Yorgos Lanthimos has shifted toward photography, noting in a Guardian interview, 2026, that he needs respite, saying, “it might be a couple...
In Australia, political cartoons were altered by several events during the 1960s: the arrival of Les Tanner’s (1927‒2001) instinctual wit at The Bulletin, Bruce Petty’s...
Recognition of the importance of early bark paintings and their link to the world’s oldest continuing culture, is what makes them both highly sought and...
I had come to see my daughter sing in Deborah Kelly’s Creation Choir and was fortunate enough to make it inside the gallery for the...
Cuban-born, Brisbane-based artist Jorge Mariño Brito’s practice unfolds across two material registers that are best understood not as parallel tracks but as entwined explorations. Both...
The first work you encounter in Edge City is a gate, Settlement #8, 2025. Not one to pass through (not anymore), but a threshold nonetheless....
Designed to impress, the number and size of paintings—twenty-nine at nine square metres each and one even bigger—are a spectacle, lifting the exhibition from an...