About + CV
Wilson’s multiform practice, includes performance, costume, tapestry and ceramics but centres on painting.
Wilson has presented work at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Royal Academy of Arts (London), BALTIC 39, (Newcastle), The Bauhaus Museum, (Dessau), The Museum of London, Newlyn Gallery, (Cornwall), The Cervantes Institute, New Dehli, The Tetley, Leeds and The Armory Centre, (California). Her writing on Painting and Performance is published in Edition 9.2 of the Journal of Contemporary Painting. Accompanying the journal she held an in-conversation titled SHAPESHIFTER: Painting & Performance with Catherine Wood (Director of Exhibitions & Programmes Tate Modern).
Wilson lives and works in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2008-2010), and a Practice based PhD awarded by University of Leeds (2017). She is a Senior Lecturer of BA Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Her work explores subjects that elude conventional language such as unseen forces in nature, inherited knowledge (the collective unconscious, Jung) as well as otherworldly events such as visitations and premonitions. She weaves together images of animals, spirals, hands, atmospheric phenomena, and patterns found in animal camouflage.
Working across mediums her work is crystallised around the notion of liveness. Paintings in oil bar and acrylic employ collage, and techniques; decalcomania, frottage and grattage, that make visible the invisible. She first worked like this as a child; taking rubbings of Neolithic carved cup-and-ring marks in Yorkshire.
She recalls, I felt that my hands were touching the hands of my ancestors, something I found totally magical. This reveals her interest in temporal collapse, believing the past is not behind us, but beside us.
She is fascinated by materials, objects, events and images that shapeshift, elude material fixity, and exist in a state of flux, reconfiguring and coalescing so as to dissolve again. For example, she often works on unconventional painting surfaces, replacing panel and canvas and opting to paint on holographic substrates, this allows her works to change colour as the audience moves around them, these particular paintings can be likened to how it might be to observe a chameleon walk through a rainbow. Her exhibitions also shapeshift she might cloak gallery walls with large scale paintings on loose fabric, draped to function as theatre backdrops for moments of live activation, whilst her works displayed on walls are often taken off the wall and worn as costumes in performance.
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