Born 1959, Cape Town. Based in Kommetjie, South Africa

Gill Allderman is a contemporary artist working primarily in mixed media, exploring themes of movement, history, and belonging. Her work is created in series, each unfolding a narrative through texture, colour, and structure.In her art practice she glues, slices, makes cross-sections through time and life and sews together the pieces. She paints, moulds and weaves materials together intuitively and tries to find the threads that stitch and hold them as an anchor to her experience.

Gill holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art with Distinction from Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT (2021). Her artistic practice is deeply influenced by place—whether capturing the architectural rhythm of Parisian bridges, the fluidity of water as a space of refuge, or the forgotten routes that shape our collective memory.

Gill has exhibited locally and internationally, her works reflect a balance between concept, abstraction, and storytelling, always searching for meaning in the spaces we cross and inhabit.

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The works presented from Where Strangers Meet in Water interrogate the ocean as a contested space of passage, foregrounding the precarious conditions under which bodies traverse it. Through the recurring motif of the boat and the use of repeated, tally-like marks, Allderman invokes temporal systems associated with waiting, counting, and survival—gestures that allude to experiences of confinement, migration, and crisis.

The smaller works extend this inquiry through the physical extraction of paint from the surface, where absence becomes a generative device. Here, subtraction operates as both formal strategy and conceptual register, indexing loss, displacement, and the instability of presence.

Situated within a broader South African and global context, Allderman’s work resists direct narration, instead constructing a contemplative field in which material processes and implied histories remain in tension.

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