With swag, grace and a touch of ice cold humour
With a little swag in her step and a smirk that cuts through the cold air, Gillian Armstrong steps onto the ice in Frankfurt. It’s winter, and the rink is brutal — the kind of cold that crawls under your skin. But for her, this wasn’t discomfort. It’s home.
We found Gillian through Yuedam’s outreach program — a project we launched to connect with undiscovered talent across Europe. Late November, a profile caught our attention. Her skating was sharp, but her personality; that’s what stayed with us.
Gillian’s story starts in Mannheim, a city known for being a little rough around the edges. She first put on skates when she was very young, and from that moment, the ice became her second skin. Skating is expensive. It’s time-consuming, and in a city like Mannheim, it’s not exactly the most obvious path that many take. But for some reason Gillian kept showing up, long after the excitement wore off and the real work began. By the time she hit her twenties, she had gone from hobby skater to professional performer, skating in seasonal productions Disney on Ice, carving her own lane in a sport that rarely makes room.
Here at Yuedam, we are drawn to the way people move through life, the grit that lives underneath the talent, we seek to understand that reason for survival
Gillian built her whole identity on staying upright (quite literally) when life tried to knock her down. We don’t believe athletes are separate from artists. And Gillian? She’s simply both.
This series “GRACE ON ICE” was shot entirely with a Sony 85mm, staying along the edges of the rink. The sound. That’s the sound of working in cold air, staying close to the moment, even when it’s imperfect. I cleaned it up, sure — but I left just enough so the final video still feels like you’re there, hearing her blades cut into the ice.
