Terrence Higgins Trust’s highly anticipated annual auction returns to Christie’s London on 25th March 2026, to raise vital funds to help support people living with HIV and end new HIV cases in the UK. All lots can be viewed and bid on The Auction Collective website, opening the event to collectors across the globe:
It is an honour to donate this work to the auction and support the incredible work of the Terrence Higgins Trust in their mission to end new cases of HIV, support people living with HIV and fight HIV stigma.
This work marks a celebration of a victory that once seemed beyond reach.
Something moved among us…
Quietly, without form…
Passing through rooms of laughter and leaving them altered.
It took without distinction. From brilliance and from lives still gathering their first shape, with the same indifferent hand.
What remained was not only loss, but its residue: a silence that settled into the air, into the body, into the space between people. And yet, even there, something endured. What was left behind- fragments, traces, the barest remains- began, slowly, to gather light. Not all at once. Not for everyone. But enough. Enough to mark a way forward, enough to be carried.
So today, a glass is raised. To those who refused that silence, who held on, who worked, who stayed when leaving would have been easier. And to a future that asks something better of us. Less distance, less fear, less need to turn away. A future where nothing is taken early, and nothing is diminished for being what it is.
@terrencehigginstrust@laldalamal@theauctioncollective
The Anatomy of an Exhibition, Chapter 3: The Flame Endures…
Water washes clean.
Fire purifies.
It transforms as it reveals.
Its only price is humility.
Metal flows.
Monuments fall.
Forests become ash.
Yet fire renews life.
It turns the cycle.
In the belly it burns as ambition.
In the heart, as love.
In the mind, it reduces ignorance to ash.
The flame endures.
@thaddaeusropac
🎞️ • Dom Gilday
Chapter 2, Ballet of Life:
Scribed within concentric constrictions,
These ever-narrowing caged boundaries
Body and board bound within the studio construction,
Ideas become lines trapped within the confines of the formatted self,
Memories morph into impenetrable marginalia,
Experiences appear as hues trapped within cofferdams of thought.
The psyche has nowhere to hide…
It must reveal long-lost years in layers.
The tightening space within the margins suggests absent images,
When rendered, they feel as though the embalmer has removed another bandage,
To reveal the next vivid imprint,
Of a quality so fresh, sensation so strong,
That fragrant walk through the spring wildflowers,
When the earth and sky were one.
When I was one of the fireflies…
Carrying a light in my bosom.
The illuminator of my own constellation of dreams.
The sovereign torchbearer and supreme architect.
Of that vast world of endless imagination.
The only great universe, then;
Is the one that begins to take shape.
@thaddaeusropac
🎞️ • Dom Gilday
For the inquisitively curious-
The Anatomy of an Exhibition, in five chapters:
‘Echoes Over Arabia’- Art Basel Doha @thaddaeusropac
Chapter 1, Ready to Receive:
Idea or inspiration?
Concept or conception?
Decision or dissolution?
Sand or sound?
The stillness of the night, amongst the distant, shallow gongs of muffled heartbeats… the squishy noise of another pump full of blood irrigating the ears… the self begins to rise like smoke from an expiring flame… the embers of ego collapse, exhausted after their sound-and-fury dance, turning into layers of ash — rising in shadowy surrender through the narrow corridors of mind and memory… the crackling embers illuminating all that hurt us, yet built us; those who taught us that the greatest joy is to love — in reverence, without return.
Within this column of sparkling ash… a door opens… a rabbit hole in the sky, spilling over with the voices of many ancestors, beyond many galaxies…
As visions rain down, the soot stings the eyes — the only secret key sluice opens the dam doors; a tsunami of tears soothing the soul, soaking the reams of papyrus, till every page reflects the dance of the constellations above… and the scribe begins to write… with a quill fed with blood — of a billion men who went too soon, for the billion more that shall roam over garden, glen, and glade… with bones made of crystals and minds made of microchips…
They will weep at visions so common to us… the camels pulling ribbons of caravans over shifting dunes of rippling sands… the sound of a lover’s last sigh… those Echoes over Arabia.
🎞️ • Dom Gilday
The beginning of a new year is an ideal moment to sever what is worn out and spent, clearing space for new growth—purified by fire.
As we prepare for the much-anticipated early February presentation at Art Basel Doha, in collaboration with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, the studio moves into a phase of renewed intensity, focus, and transformation.
What remains is sharpened.
What emerges is inevitable.
In gratitude beyond words, and with deepest reverence,
I thank you, one and all,
for the gift of 2025—
the most magical year of my life.
May 2026 be a year of light and grace.
I wish you the happiest year ahead.
Trust Dom to subject moving image to aesthetic penance.
Extracting a prayer…
Not record, not proof, but revelation—
the long, inward breath before a painting awakes,
the private weather of its becoming.
The endless season of its own perpetual joy!
“The Hermit”, drawn from a panel of Paradise Lost, rests in the Lesser Himalayas of the imagination, where altitude is measured not in peaks of noise but in silence learned by a heart nurtured by solitude. Here Man and his animal companion stand unranked, beyond dominion or doubt, their bond older than language, sealed within a landscape without end.
Man —named the paragon of animals— sets down the sceptre of reason and listens.
Instinct answers instinct.
Eye meets eye.
In this shared stillness, hierarchy dissolves,
They rejoice eternally…
and the world remembers itself before separation was conceived.
Dom’s film breathes with the painting.
It follows the slow gravity of thought, the patient layering of devotion and resolve, until image and temperament are one.
The hermit is never alone—
united with his companion,
never to be separated again.
This is Eternal Paradise….
Regained!!!!
🎞️ • Dom Gilday
As this year of contradicting extremes draws to a close—ecstatic celebrations set against harrowing separations of equal magnitude—the final painting of 2025 pauses in gratitude: for time on earth, and for the fragile, incandescent beauty of our planet. A glass is raised, quietly but resolutely.
The moon, in its many guises, has been much in the news of late. Yet the most beautiful moon I have ever encountered revealed itself at the Huntington, during my opening in the autumn of 2024. Hence the title “Huntington Moon”. The work is dedicated to the luminous and formidable Christina Nielsen, who made the exhibition possible, and who—quite rightly—installed the moon as the true guest of honour amid the resplendent gardens of my favourite institution of all time.
@thehuntingtonlibrary@christina_nielsen_art
🎞️ • Dom Gilday
Much is to be learnt from the organic world — to yield to each movement with quiet acceptance, allowing the next to unfold of its own accord. In such surrender lies creation’s true surprise: one becomes not the author but the instrument, a vessel shaped by the unseen hand, filling each dusk with the breath of the intangible, only to awaken emptied again at dawn, ready once more to receive what the night has whispered.
True to its own trait, time pulverises the greatest constructions into fine clouds of dust that float in silence over ravines of despair, reminding us that the real beauty of beauty lies in its fleeting nature — perhaps purest joy resides in that escaping moment of the sublime? A moment of celebration certainly worthy of living through this fleeting life.
Part 2 of 2
🎞️ • @domgilday
The moon howlers return… this time they rise amidst the serpentine sinews of an ancient vine- one that once wound itself over the crumbling stones of a forgotten monastery in rural Italy.
It recalled to me the Vedic myth of the King of Snakes; used as a rope when good and evil, for a brief, terrifying moment joined hands to churn the ocean- to draw forth from its depths the nectar of immortality.
Yet before the nectar could surface, a deadly poison arose- a vaporous venom so potent it threatened to consume all creation; until it was swallowed by the One with the Blue Throat, who bore its agony to preserve the world.
A parable of our own times perhaps- now each of us must sip our own portion of the poison, holding fast to the faith that it is but the prelude to nectar yet to come.
This installation will take another form at the forthcoming solo exhibition at Compton Verney, next fall.
Part 1 of 2
🎞️ • @domgilday
