Olivia Guillot
in between blinks
29 Apr – 13 Jun 2026

No familiar shapes  
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,  
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;  
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live  
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind  
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1770-1850

Olivia Guillot’s work does not seek to resolve what is seen, but to hold it in suspension. Her  paintings examine perception as a shifting, unstable experience, grounded in the sensory  relationship between body and environment. What we encounter is not fixed or fully knowable;  instead, it is something that forms and dissolves through attention, sensation and memory.  

Beginning from encounters on daily walks, Guillot is drawn to the overlooked and the mundane as sites of transformation. She approaches objects through sensation before interpretation, engaging with energy, texture and atmosphere prior to recognition.  

I become bewitched by things like pylons, emitting energies in their lines, their textures, wires,  the low humdrum of the electricity passing through them, animating them as though they were  alive, creatures of the landscape.  

A pylon becomes animated through its rhythm, vibration and latent energy—its low electrical hum and structural tensions translated into paint in the piece The low humdrum. Influenced by moments where perception shifts or slips, the artist is interested in how the familiar can become strange, opening up a space of “unknowing” in which meaning is no longer stable.  

This sense of instability is carried through her material process. Using the malleability of paint,  Guillot builds and breaks down surfaces through an intuitive process of layering, erasure and  disruption. In The low humdrum, a glassy, saturated red field flattens the canvas into a  boundless, film-like plane, against which a dense, net-like structure gathers and disperses, culminating in a single, forceful mark. In Thick low air lurks in my hair, viscous green paint is dragged across the surface, partially obscuring flashes of yellow and blue beneath. These fragments of earlier stages remain embedded within the work, forming accumulations of density,  texture and space. As a result, Guillot’s paintings exist in a state of continual becoming. Painting becomes a way of mirroring perception itself—layered, unstable and constantly shifting.  

To encourage this intuitive way of working, and to dissuade pre-empting the outcome of the  painting, Guillot relies heavily on music and dancing when she paints. She explains:  

Painting is very similar to dancing, but instead of moving to sound frequencies you are dancing  with frequencies of colour, texture, rhythm, surface, space and densities of shape and form. Then you add in memory, feeling, chance and intention and things become interesting. Like dancing, if you think about it too long, it will look unnatural or rigid.

Guillot resists controlling the outcome, instead remaining responsive to the painting as it unfolds: painting becomes a lived, bodily experience. It is this freedom in her approach which leaves Guillot’s pieces so open. The forms occupying her paintings seem to endlessly hover in and out of focus, at the cusp of recognition, refusing to settle. In between blinks becomes both a title and a condition: a fleeting moment where perception falters, and the act of seeing opens into something unstable and speculative. Ultimately, Guillot’s work does not depict the world, but recreates the experience of  encountering it—sensory, immersive and perpetually in motion.