Elaine Wilson

Elaine Wilson was born in Scotland in 1959. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art in Scotland (Degree in Sculpture) and then completed her MA at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She has taught in Barcelona and Florence, and worked as a visiting lecturer at Birmingham, Wimbledon and Newcastle Universities and regularly at the City & Guilds of London Art School. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Britain, Europe and the USA, and exhibited in several group exhibitions at England & Co, including Recent Work—Five Artists (2002); Sartorial (2003); and After a Fashion (2005).

Wilson’s recent works, in part related to literature, combine photography with collage and other media. She says that her work ‘has always referred to the human body and figure –  primarily to explore the relationship between sexuality and gender, artifice and nature.’  

Much of her sculpture has been made of ceramic, including an installation of 50 porcelain wall objects exhibited at the Royal Society of British Sculptors. These combined anatomical elements with ornamentation: she described them as ‘fetish-ised with ribbon, beads and lace’. In 1995, Wilson was awarded a residency at the European Ceramics Centre in Holland, and while there was influenced by the ornamentation of Dutch still life painters, particularly Vermeer and van Eyck.  She was selected for an exhibition of ceramic sculpture at Alden Biesen Castle in Belgium, and on her return to Britain had a solo exhibition with a work purchased for the South East Arts collection.

In 2001, Wilson travelled to Italy on a bursary from the JD Fergusson trust, and visited Palermo, Florence and Rome. Her interests in pattern, print and decoration and women’s traditional craft skills were shown in a subsequent series of small canvases using photographs, stitching and fabric that were influenced by the Italian Baroque. The following year she was included in the exhibition Fabric at Abbot Hall in Kendal. Fourteen contemporary artists were asked to respond to the ‘fabric’ of the building in an exhibition that challenged the notion of ‘decorative art’ playing a secondary role to that of ‘fine art’. Wilson was interested at the time in ‘the sumptuous and seductive’ qualities of the work of Gustav Klimt, and fascinated by the ‘underlying tension’ she found in his paintings.

Wilson has continued to explore pattern in a series of collage works. She says that these works were initially inspired by reading The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a story published in 1892 that explored the author’s struggle to escape the restraints of a patriarchal society and used the wallpaper of the title as a metaphor and ambiguous symbol: the woman in the story describes how she ‘kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper… The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out… I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still… .’

Wilson’s aim is ‘to play with notions of artifice and deception, confinement and domesticity from a particularly female perspective.’ Her collages are constructed by cutting images of intricate lace patterns, echoing the lace-maker’s painstaking repetition and attention to detail. The layers of paper are cut and overlapped to create different focal points and depths, and each layer opens to reveal the underlying structures beneath. This effect is heightened by coating the surfaces and layers of these collage works with resin, a process that makes them reflective and glossy, and also renders the patterns beneath partly transparent, revealing traces of other layers below. Wilson says that the image of a face which is the focus point of these works, ‘competes for attention against the pattern as if coming up for air – craving visibility’. Most of the lace patterns Wilson uses represent natural organic forms, and although her work can give the impression of an Eden-like garden, she says that sometimes ‘the density threatens to suffocate, nature is caught between life and death’.

Another significant presence in Wilson’s work stems from her time in Italy: in Sicily she photographed a marble portrait by the Early Renaissance sculptor Francesco Laurana in the Museum of Art in Palermo. She says that ‘while obviously of its time, it also transcended it by communicating a presence and sense of self… an air of quiet serenity and detachment.’ She found another work by Laurana in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and has used her photographs of his marble portraits in her on-going collage series as for her they convey ‘a sense of connectedness between the past and the present’.