About + CV
Sarah Kate Wilson (b. 1982) is a British London-based artist. Her painting practice includes ceramics, tapestry and ritual-like performances that involve costumed dancers and singers who perform with her paintings.
Wilson is engaged in making visible the seemingly ‘invisible’ forces and experiences that inspire her work, from stories of otherworldly events and temporal collapse to animal mimicry and the ‘imaginal realm’ where the physical and spiritual worlds meet. Recurring motifs populate her works, including, spirals, handprints, ripples, nets, fossils and butterflies as well as the Neolithic cup-and-ring marks carved into stone on the moors of West Yorkshire where she grew up.
Her scintillating paintings made with inks, wax, crayon, acrylic and oil on panel, canvas and holographic substrates range in size from canvases that fill your peripheral vision to intimate, head-sized works. She employs various European Surrealist automatism techniques and has developed a unique variation on frottage. Rather than finding textures to take rubbings from, she creates her own tactile surfaces, collaging hundreds of cut canvas shapes directly onto her paintings. Once painted she frottages over these sedimentary layers with wax and richly pigmented oil bar. Rather than lifting impressions her rubbings remain on the painting’s surface. As many as ten layers of colour are built up in this way whilst she coaxes images to come into focus.
Her exquisite handling of colour and unique application of paint on densely textured surfaces result in deeply seductive paintings that fizz with vital energy as if alive, mirroring the natural and supernatural realms her work is inspired by.
Wilson received her MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Art, London in 2010 and Practice-based PhD (AHRC funded) awarded by University of Leeds in 2017. She has exhibited internationally including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; BALTIC 39, Newcastle, UK; The Bauhaus Museum, Dessau, Germany; The Museum of London, UK; The Tetley, Leeds, UK; The Cervantes Institute, New Delhi, India; Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall, UK; The Armory Centre, California, US; and the 5th Biennale Internazionale Donna, Trieste, Italy (2026). In 2024 she held an in-conversation about her work and research with Catherine Wood (Interim Director Tate Modern) coinciding with the publication of Wilson’s text ‘Paintings Liveness’, in the Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol.9 No. 2, Intellect Books. Wilson gave the Keynote address at the Symposium ‘Painting in the Expanded Field’, MTU Crawford College of Art and Design (2024). She has undertaken artist residencies at Xenia Creative Retreat, Hampshire, UK, Bauhaus Dessau, Germany and West Dean College, Chicester, UK within the Surrealist archives.