Gabby Testaferrata Olivier

BIOGRAPHY

Gabby Testaferrata Olivier is a Boorloo/Perth based emerging artist, with a practice traversing sculpture, ceramics, installation, video and print.

She graduated from NMTafe in 2023 with an Advanced Diploma in Visual Arts, following on from previous careers and study in fashion, and film and television.

Gabby was nominated for PICA’s Hatched National Graduate Show 2024, and organized and exhibited in the group show ‘Make Yourself at Home’ 2024 (Shopfront).

In July 2024, her work featured in the The Journal of Australian Ceramics as part of the National education pictorial survey. In November 2025, Gabby again featured in the Journal, writing an article “BOOM”, detailing her practice, alongside new works.

Also in 2025, she featured and won the emerging artist award at Sculpture at Bathers, Fremantle.

She is a commissioned artist with works in public and private collections.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Drawing on her own ambiguous relationship to societal expectations and the feeling of not quite belonging, Gabby Testaferrata Olivier reframes experiences of exclusion through a lens of resilience, humour, and gentle provocation. Her practice uses wit and sensitivity to open up conversations around vulnerability, identity, and the quiet negotiations of selfhood, inviting viewers to reconsider their assumptions.

Working across process-driven disciplines—including sculpture, video, print, and installation—she embraces methods that allow time for reflection and deliberate making. These processes become spaces for thinking, dwelling, and transforming autobiographical moments. By materialising personal memories and emotional tensions, she renders them psychologically powerless, shifting them from sites of discomfort into objects of agency and play.

While her work engages with an intensely personal narrative, it is infused with a sense of the ridiculous and a persistent thread of hope. This balance enables complex themes to be encountered with openness and ease, offering viewers an accessible entry point into experiences that are at once intimate, disarming, and quietly transformative.