“Mary Gillett makes etchings and paintings which combine inner and outer landscapes to create highly tactile, visceral and yet sublime images. She works with landscapes of bleak immensity: Dartmoor, the Cornish Coast and British Columbia which are subject to harsh weather conditions, and where the geology of the earth is exposed and often difficult to traverse.
Her work always comes out of direct physical immersion in the landscape, where she makes sketches, writings and photographs, which she brings back to the studio.  There she places her plate or canvas horizontally, and engages physically with the image surface through a layering of processes including random pouring of acid and water, painting, scratching, scraping and burnishing, drawing, and vigorous erosion of the surface to create highly charged emotional and psychological landscapes.  These works often seem to refer more to what has been removed than to the marks that are left, powerful relics of physical and chemical activity.”
Tabatha Andrews, sculptor.