Description
 ‘My body of work primarily explores imagined landscapes. Often made in series, the paintings vary greatly in scale, from intimate miniatures on cast resin and wood to large canvases. I work with an intentionally restricted colour palette, applying oil in thin glazes to smooth, meticulously hand-finished gesso surfaces.
The landscapes I explore in my paintings are always uninhabited, solitary spaces, sometimes familiar yet otherworldly. A predominant feature of my paintings is the subtle effect created by light through space over time. Ultimately the works attempt to create a dreamlike tension between reality, memory and the imagination.
The Shadow Series began at the end of 2025 with the first of five small paintings on wood made in a portrait format, unusual for me at the time. A preoccupation in my paintings over the past couple of years, has been light fading to darkness in an imagined wood. The almost monochromatic palette of these works has gradually shifted to become punctuated by sudden transitions in tone. The Shadow Series is a progression of these subtle shifts to include more dramatic transitions; to eclipsed light or a palette suggestive of ultraviolet or a photographic negative; unusual shifts in tone which give a strange luminosity. I find it interesting that photographic negatives, or thermal cameras reveal a hidden reality, the other side of what we are usually able to perceive. I’ve always loved that birds and insects see the world in tetrachromatic UV.’
— Gill Rocca, 2026
