Sculptor
Gillian Christy makes sculpture from the familiar objects of everyday life. She uses the term “Connectors” to describe the focus of her work, exploring through sculpture what connects home with one’s everyday surroundings. More than twenty years ago, she packed her mini-van in Iowa and headed East. The farm implements and propane tanks she sculpted in Iowa gave way to the clapboards and smokestacks of her new home in New England. Working in welded stainless steel, bronze, and steel, she transforms sheet metal into organic, warm pieces that explore movement, repetition, and growth.
Christy has built her career creating monumental artwork for the public realm. Her sculptures include Winged Kelp, a large-scale stainless steel and vinyl mesh work installed at City Hall Plaza in Portland, Maine, in 2025, and Home, which was on view at Pittsburgh International Airport beginning in 2019. Other public works include Pathways, a community-informed gateway to Main Street in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and Fence Roadway at Cedar Falls City Hall in Iowa. Both Winged Kelp and Home are now available through Jeff Soderbergh Gallery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Alongside her public art practice, Christy makes smaller-scale sculpture for galleries, exhibitions, and private collections, using this work to explore ideas that can grow into larger projects. She received a 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Craft, which supported her Tabernacle series and culminated in a 2022 solo exhibition at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Her work has also been supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Rhode Island Foundation, and Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
Christy earned her BFA from the University of Northern Iowa in 2002. She lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.