Guppy is a 21 year old artist from Brisbane (Meanjin), QLD Australia. She makes vibrant, colourful, emotional art that is informed by her twin gifts of autism and synesthesia, art that showcases the messiness and beauty of the collision of intense inner and outer worlds.
I paint every day like someone would write in their journal every night. It’s how I process things. Piece by piece, I hope to give you a new perspective on how life is lived when your mind is a double edged sword.
Art has always been a part of Guppy’s life; she has always known that she was put on the earth to create.
I have always been an artist. While other kids were still in the scribble stage, I was painting brightly coloured flowers and houses. My childhood was full of marker sets, coloured pencils, loose paper & those terrible plasticky watercolours. Art was my escape from this growing pressure on my brain.
And, as she grew, Guppy came to realize that art helped her express her emotions in a way nothing else could.
As the world grew more overwhelming, I sunk further into my art. For hours after 3 pm, you would find me hunched over my desk, just drawing. I drew hundreds, maybe thousands of unique characters. Looking back, I can tell you that each character I drew was inspired by an intense state of emotion, coinciding with the start of puberty. Drawing quickly became a tool for processing & expressing how I was feeling.
And, as she gained more experience and confidence, Guppy realized that her art was not just a personal outlet; it was also a way to connect with other people who experienced some of the same feelings, a cathartic outlet for them, a way to make people feel seen.
In those years, art became both my outlet and my mirror. It was a way to express what I felt, and a way to recognise who I was becoming. As I got older, the drawings melted into painting, collage & design. My art matured as I did. As I left high school and began to heal, I realised that my work was more than just a way to cope; it was a way to connect. Where words failed, colours and shapes spoke. Where I felt isolated, my art gave others a way in. My friends were the ones who made me realise that the emotions I was portraying were not mine to bear alone. They saw my work and found themselves reflected in it.
Recently (starting August 2025), Guppy has also worked hard on her social media, sharing many of her paintings, creating more reels, and sharing details about the inspiration behind some pieces. The effort paid off, and the results were impressive. By early November 2025, she was averaging 50K+ total views on all her posts every month, with one viral reel (titled “This is my favourite plate”, posted on 4 October) reaching more than 14.5 million people, receiving more than a quarter of a million likes, and almost 5,000 comments. It’s only seven seconds long, but it features vivid colours, tongue-in-cheek humour, and (yay for serendipitous anagrams) a plate with petals.
Guppy’s Gifts
A certain group of people in our world feel everything too much. Joy, grief, anxiety, all of it. Their deep, harrowed connection to the world around them renders them wiser, kinder and stronger than most. But the noise? The noise is constant.
I am one of those people.
Guppy was born with Grapheme-Colour Synesthesia and Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). These gifts confer on her a unique understanding and experience of the external world, and the boldness and vividness of her work is a consequence of these. For example, the sensory hypersensitivity that comes from her ASC results in deep attention to detail and allows her to create complex (in both concept and execution) pieces of high quality in a relatively small period of time.
The way in which her brain works often lets her bypass linear thinking and solution design. Instead, Guppy can use orthogonal thinking to put together ideas in new and unexpected ways, leading to unique design innovations. Additionally, the overstimulation that comes from feeling and experiencing things intensely makes her art extremely powerful, creating an unusually deep emotional connection with the viewer.
A piece is not finished until I can see my emotions staring back at me.
Grapheme-Colour Synesthesia means that Guppy associates elements of written language (including numbers, letters, words, and punctuation marks) with different colours, patterns, and special characteristics. This involuntary association means that the external world is perceived by her much more vividly than is usual. Research has also shown that people who have both Synesthesia and ASC are more likely to develop savant skills – for example, Guppy’s artistic talent and extreme ability to focus on an artwork could be a consequence of this co-occurrence.
Multiple aspects of Grapheme-Colour Synesthesia and Autism Spectrum Condition go into enhancing the unique nature of Guppy’s paintings. Hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, her highly detailed and vivid inner world (and the interaction of that inner world with external connections and inputs), and overstimulation all inform the art that she creates.
“Inside I see” is a mixed media artwork that contains, in a microcosm, all of the themes that inform Guppy’s work; it translates every bit of her intense inner world into bold and colourful visuals. It contains worlds within worlds; look closely, and you will see many visual elements that recur in Guppy’s work, from organic shapes, spiral patterns, squiggly curves, and splotches of colour to a depiction of the artist as part of the painting, floral elements and fishes; there is more than one type of (G/g)uppy on this canvas! “Inside I see” feels like it could be a large mural, a wallpaper pattern, or even a ceiling painting, adorning the inside of a huge dome.
I make paintings for people like us 🙂
Guppy’s art is fundamentally informed by her perspective on the world, and it has a very powerful impact on people who see the world differently, too. Her art is created for a minority diverse audience, and her social media comments are filled with positive feedback and reflections on how calming and peaceful the elements of her work are, and how special it is to see art made from diverse perspectives for diverse people.
Her art also resonates powerfully with neurotypical audiences; pieces like “Inside I see” help viewers understand a little about the unique ways in which Guppy experiences and understands the world, and provide an authentic, first-person perspective of neurodiversity, as opposed to the broad generalizations and inaccuracies which characterize many traditional media depictions of people with Autism Spectrum Condition.
“In Self Defence”, 2024
This mixed-media artwork (acrylic, paint pen, and alcohol marker on canvas) is a stark visual analogy for how overstimulation in a busy, unfamiliar, movement-heavy environment can activate a fight-or-flight response for someone with autism. It shows how it feels to have the instinct of a hunted animal.
Because I have autism, I cannot always correctly predict the behaviours of other people, specifically physical movement.
Say I’m trying to navigate a busy city sidewalk. People never seem to move the direction I think they will, so I move on high alert.
All of the information I am receiving is becoming quickly overwhelming, and every step I take seems to be in the wrong direction. I can feel the movement of everybody around me, hear each pant leg brushing. An elbow to my arm is all it will take to turn me into a hunted animal.
My brain interprets unanticipated movement as a threat.
The artistic decision to depict the skeleton of the dog that lives under the skin is very interesting. In real life, we only really observe the terror of the hunted animal properly over a period of time, when we see the bared fangs, the backing away, the hissing, the tension in every muscle. And a static artwork can only capture that level of discomfort when it uses unsettling visuals.
The skeleton – with its bones set rigidly into splayed attitudes, with every tooth on edge, ears lying flat on the skull, and bone breaks to accentuate the macabreness of it all – helps us feel the fear of the hunted animal, helps us understand a tiny bit of a permanent fight-or-flight response. The colour palette of the piece is also in keeping with its theme, conveying hints of blood and danger and visceral underpinnings.
Imagine you are stuck in your fight or flight response every single day of your life. Which one do you choose?
Guppy’s First Exhibition (+) The Bush Fairies Collection
Guppy exhibited The Bush Fairies Collection at Kaye West Galleries in Camp Hill. The theme of the group exhibition was “We were young once”; pieces within the exhibition explored childhood memories, nostalgia, and the melancholy of growing up.
The Bush Fairies Collection comprises 22 paintings on small circular plaster discs. The collection was inspired by 2 acres of native bushland and veggie gardens in and around Guppy’s childhood home.
The Bush Fairies are also more “realistic” than depictions of fairies in most media. Fairies are traditionally shown to be entirely happy and comfortable; seraphic smiles are the norm. In contrast, Guppy’s Bush Fairies, in some pieces, dance ecstatically in nature, completely at ease. But in other pieces, their attitudes are more rigid, indicative of tension or discomfort. This makes them feel more real; even though they are born of fantasy, it is nice to think that fairies need not always be posed, need not always live up to a romantic ideal we impose on them.
And the Bush Fairies are not depicted as being different from the leaves, plants, and shrubs that they live in and among. Rather, they are part of them, made of them, with flower petals framing faces, grass skirts stirred by the cosmic wind, mosaiced backgrounds reminding us of the endless beauty and soothing geometry that Nature gifts to all beings.
The colour scheme chosen for the Bush Fairies Collection is an interesting blend of Guppy’s vibrant and vivid world with tones that are traditionally associated with the earth. It makes the Bush Fairies soar while they are grounded; it places them in a different universe where everything is more intense, but also in our reality. It makes us want to relive the endless possibilities that our childhood imaginations created in and around a sere field scattered with a few sun-baked plants.
“Unfounded”
“Unfounded” is one of the most personal of Guppy’s paintings; it was created as a tribute to Julian, her best friend and twin flame. Julian committed suicide two weeks before the pandemic lockdowns in Queensland lifted in 2020.
The English language simply does not have enough words for pain. As somebody who wields the dictionary like both a weapon & an accessibility aid, I have a great love for ultra-specific words. Like, only once in a blue moon will that ever be appropriate to use in a sentence kind of words.
We link to Guppy’s blog post about “Unfounded”; it is more eloquent than our words could ever be.
Digital Accentuation of Analog Art
Though Guppy’s pieces usually start life as physical paintings or drawings, they often reach their final form after slight digital corrections. She is currently (as of November 2025) a 4th year student at the Queensland University of Technology. Her twin undergraduate majors (visual communication and advertising) have influenced the paths that each of her pieces takes as it nears completion, with every small added digital enhancement serving to communicate the core message of the piece more clearly, to have a more pronounced effect on the viewer.
“Guts” was initially created as an entirely analog piece: oil pastel on paper. After hi-res photography, Guppy worked on the piece in Photoshop, and added graininess and texture, helping each element stand out more clearly against the background. These small adjustments – just a little colour correction, really – helped the piece align more closely with her initial artistic vision.
And the finished piece is visceral, raw, and real. You can’t look away, and the sheer coiled-ness and blood-soaked splendour of the guts draw you in. It’s not comfortable, but it is magnificent.
Guppy’s Self Portraits
As part of an ongoing process of self-exploration, Guppy creates self-portraits that produce varying emotional effects based on their colour spectra.
The original painting was treated with different gradient maps to create different colour variants. The overall effect is a little like seeing a series of stamps of a prominent personage rendered through different RGB filters; Guppy’s art invests its subjects with grandeur and mystique; everyone is a monarch.
Every colour palette produces a different mood, a different emotional effect that varies according to the viewer. Those who interacted with the piece on social media talked about some variants producing feelings of peace, some inducing nostalgia, some projecting waves of safety, and some producing sadness. Pieces like this, where Guppy’s inner worlds connect with other people’s external worlds, really illustrate the power and uniqueness of her art.
The cloud patterns that form a 360 degree halo around Guppy’s face in this piece are fitting accompaniments. Clouds vary widely in colour; they can be sunny and bright or grey and gloomy or crackling and portentous. They are also ethereal and elevate their surroundings to a higher plane.
Future Plans
I want to become an advocate for my community. I want to use my work to not only uplift other autistic people, but to create a common culture. I want to highlight all of the beautiful things about brains like mine, and help other people recognise the beautiful things about their brains. This is especially pertinent in our society, where autistic people are discriminated against, shunned and excluded, due to them having a different way of communicating. We don’t communicate with silences and eye rolls and invisible social queues, we use our words. What stops autistic people from gaining access to help, community and support is the fact that there often are not words to describe how we feel. This is where I believe that my art can come in.
I dream of bridging the gap between autistic culture and allistic culture. I believe that there is a lack of clarity about the autistic experience that must be remedied before any meaningful societal change can take place.
In 10 years from now I dream of:
– Speaking at events, fundraisers, conferences etc
– Contributing to social science research into autism as a genetic difference, not a disorder
– Writing and illustrating more books for autistic people AND allistic peopleI hope to still be operating under the name Guppy, as this mask gives me the ability to be vulnerable in ways I don’t think I could be without it. It is my dream that Guppy is recognised historically as an artist at the forefront of a social movement.
Links
Guppy – Website: https://guppyart.space/.
Guppy – Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/guppy.rt/.
Guppy – Prints: https://guppyart.space/collections.