GIGI MILLS is a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mills was born into the family of the well-known Mills Brothers Circus and spent her earliest years largely unattended, with free reign among the circus animals. The chimps, horses, camels, and elephants were her closest friends and babysitters. Her early training was in the performing arts, earning her BFA in Theatre and Masters in Choreography before turning to the plastic arts. Mills works both with oil painting and wood-fired ceramic sculpture, often in series that are reflective of a life spent largely in solitude. Both her painting and sculpture retain an autobiographical quality, rendering her own life against that which is witnessed, and distilling out its emotional essence. ARTIST STATEMENT My paintings explore the quiet tension between solitude and connection, stillness and motion. Using oil on linen, birch, book board, or paper, I build simplified compositions where figures and objects exist in pared down spaces—fields of muted color punctuated by sharp moments of brightness or saturated minimal environments that invite reflection rather than narrative. They are emotional rather than descriptive. The figures are often absorbed in moments of pause—sitting, leaning, drifting. Observers. I am drawn to gestures that reveal the interior life without words. A swimmer suspended in water, friends in conversation, a solitary person adrift at sea. With each scene I’m hoping to capture an intimate rhythm of thought and being. Color and form serve as emotional anchors. Flattened planes and subdued palettes create stillness, while flashes of color act as quiet disruptions, signals off presence, vitality, or memory. My brushwork remains deliberate and often textured, leaving traces of process visible within the restraint of composition. Ultimately, my work is about perception and atmosphere—how the simplest shapes can hold complex emotion, and how silence can speak. I hope to offer the viewer a space for contemplation, where the ordinary becomes a vessel for mystery.