Art has always been Gill’s first love, but her path began in a very different world. After leaving school she joined Thames Valley Police, where she served for 30 years – 24 of them on the Specialist Search and Recovery Team as a police diver and body recovery specialist. She became the first female police diver in the UK, later leading her team as Sergeant, and was deployed to Thailand after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to assist with victim identification. Gill was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for her work in diving, disaster response and charity support.
In 2010 she retired to Skye, where her husband Ian ran an art gallery, and she taught herself photography. Focusing on Scottish landscapes and auroras, she preferred quiet, hidden scenes over familiar tourist views, building a loyal following for her distinctive images and contributing to a five-year underwater project around Skye that featured on television and in magazines.
Gradually Gill returned to painting, using her photographs as reference. Drawn to fine detail, she began creating intricate miniature oil paintings on unusual surfaces such as clam shells, ceramic alumina, polymin and acrylic tiles. Her work, often centred on Scottish landscapes and wildlife, is full of tiny, carefully observed detail. In 2023 and 2024 she had pieces accepted by the Royal Society of Miniature Painters at the Bankside Gallery in London, with four works shortlisted for the 2025 exhibition.
Gill and Ian relocated to the Cairngorms in December 2023, where she continues to combine photography and miniature painting, taking daily inspiration from the wild landscapes and wildlife on her doorstep.
