Goddess of small things
By Catherine Keenan
January 21, 2006
Foraging, hoarding and intuition helped Shona Wilson become one of art's best-kept secrets. Shona Wilson's studio is a cross between a drafting office and a witch's larder. There are big wooden tables on which she makes her art, but the shelves feature no paints or pencils. Instead, they are crammed with
boxes and plastic takeaway containers holding feathers, leaf skeletons, bits of lobster shells, spider casings, bones of all sizes, sea urchins, flaky rafts of fish eggs, and twigs. Lots of twigs.
Wilson's previous exhibitions have featured assemblages made from a variety of materials, but the next show will be twigs only. She collects them on walks around her house overlooking Bungan Beach, freezes them for 48 hours to kill any bugs, and sorts them into boxes for straight, thin, thick and knobbly. Then she glues the first stick into place and, in a painstaking process, works with tweezers to find another that fits exactly alongside it, then another that fits exactly alongside that, and so on. "With the really thin sticks, the ones that are about a millimetre in width, it would take me a week to do a panel that big," she says, indicating a shape about 20cm by 20cm. "Hence now I'm doing big twigs." The problem is that as the twigs get bigger, so do the pieces. The largest one to date is three metres by one metre and took eight months to make. "I nearly gave up artwork after that."
Wilson is, in the words of Herald art critic John McDonald, "one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary Australian art". Her fragile, intricate work is easy to like, and at exhibitions at Manly Regional Art Gallery and Museum and Michael Nagy Fine Art in Woollahra, people typically respond with a series of "oohs" and "aahs". There is the "ooh" as they realise that her shimmering chain-mail-style net is made from fish scales sewn together. There is the
"aah" that comes from discovering an assemblage resembling the surface of the ocean is made from popped and dried bluebottles.
As people get up close, captivation by the novelty of her work gives way to a kind of awe at the effort involved. Have you ever tried hand-stitching pieces of dried seaweed together?
Finally - and for Wilson, this is the important bit - people are astonished by the materials themselves, by the colours in sea urchin shells, for example, or the faded glory of pressed hydrangea flowers. "It makes something very usual and everyday, special," she says. Wilson spends much of the summer and autumn collecting while walking along the beach or in the bush near her home. She rarely sets out to forage for a particular thing, just picking up whatever catches her eye - a bird claw or a leaf - and things can sit around her studio for years before she works out what she wants to do with them. In winter, she tends to hunker down and put the pieces together. Sometimes, she heads to the Blue Mountains to do something different.
Wilson trained in sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, but her work then was dominated by installations and after graduation she did public, conceptual art. "And realised kinda quickly that you just pour a whole lot of money into that and it's not really that wellappreciated," she says ruefully.
She switched tack when she discovered clay and has since done courses in glazing technology and made pottery an integral part of her practice. By the sea, she makes her collages of natural materials; in the mountains, she uses clay to construct more architectural works, like miniature fortresses, which often play around with the idea of buildings. Her next exhibition (at Moss Green in Melbourne, in November) will feature both types of pieces, which she
hopes "will create some kind of dialogue between them". The two sides of her output are also linked by small windows, which have become her
signature. It started when she had to make holes in her ceramic pieces to allow air to escape, and decided to turn them into a feature. Now all her pieces, including the assemblages, have a little square or rectangular niche cut into them, like a mysterious window. "It counteracts the naturalness of everything else. It's about your imagination going somewhere else. It's an escape route," she explains. Wilson, 41, was born in Scotland, but her family returned to Sydney when she was five. They lived in Manly, and her parents were avid bushwalkers. "I think that set me up for life. Mum was always going, 'Look at that' and getting into details of things on bushwalks. As a kid,you're just like, 'So what?' But now it's paid off."
Her father was an architect, but it was still unusual for her to turn to art. The way she tells it, though, it wasn't really a decision. Art was just something she did growing up and never quite stopped. "Sometimes I'll say I'm an artist by default. Most other people I went to college with could type or they had some other skill in some other area that they fell back on. And I'm kind of glad in a way that I didn't, because it's just forced me down this route."
Wilson got her break after she and her partner set up Federation Zen, a second-handfurniture and bric-a-brac shop in Clovelly. He concentrated on the furniture; she focused on finding artists to show their work and introduced pieces of her own. It worked well in the mid-'90s when the distressed/recycled look was in, and his furniture nicely complemented her assemblages reusing everyday materials. Soon the art (hers and other people's) became the main focus. In 1998, she got a dealer and closed the shop.
Wilson doesn't make a great living from her work and there is none of her art in the house because she has to sell everything she makes. Because her pieces take so long, she can make only two or three big works each year, or up to 20 small ones. Many people have suggested she get an assistant, but Wilson says this is impossible. "Because I work intuitively, a lot of the time I'm making a thing and I'm not really knowing why I'm making it, it's just a need to make it, an urge to make it."
Sometimes, it's not until years later that she realises why. Wilson says she becamefascinated by the idea of working on a small scale when she arrived in Kathmandu in 1989 and was feeling overwhelmed. "I was just walking down this street and there was a little niche in the wall with an icon in it. And I was looking at it, and I realised that everything else kind of dissolved while my attention was on this one little thing. I just thought, 'Wow, that's incredible it can have that effect.' That's when I first started looking for small things." It wasn't until she'd been working on small pieces for years, putting windows into each one, that she realised the windows, too, were a legacy of this moment - a recreation of that niche she saw in the wall.
Wilson says it's this process of revelation that keeps her interested in her art. When she begins a piece, she is never entirely sure where it will end up and that's where the excitement lies. With her first twig piece, for instance, she thought she was making a purely textural work but then a flowing, wave-like pattern emerged. "I was like, 'Of course! That's the water in the wood! That's how trees grow!"' She included waves in the entire series and called it Streamline.
For now, despite occasional stiffness from hunching over her work table, Wilson seems content to be secluded in her study, making her painstaking pieces. During her last exhibition, at Manly, visitors wrote messages in a comments book, which Wilson has photocopied and kept. "In my dark, lonely hours I'm going to get it out and read and think, That's what it's all for, that reaction.' To make that person feel that is amazing. I still firmly believe that I might put it together, but it's the beauty of nature that excites people when they see the work."
By Catherine Keenan
January 21, 2006
Foraging, hoarding and intuition helped Shona Wilson become one of art's best-kept secrets. Shona Wilson's studio is a cross between a drafting office and a witch's larder. There are big wooden tables on which she makes her art, but the shelves feature no paints or pencils. Instead, they are crammed with
boxes and plastic takeaway containers holding feathers, leaf skeletons, bits of lobster shells, spider casings, bones of all sizes, sea urchins, flaky rafts of fish eggs, and twigs. Lots of twigs.
Wilson's previous exhibitions have featured assemblages made from a variety of materials, but the next show will be twigs only. She collects them on walks around her house overlooking Bungan Beach, freezes them for 48 hours to kill any bugs, and sorts them into boxes for straight, thin, thick and knobbly. Then she glues the first stick into place and, in a painstaking process, works with tweezers to find another that fits exactly alongside it, then another that fits exactly alongside that, and so on. "With the really thin sticks, the ones that are about a millimetre in width, it would take me a week to do a panel that big," she says, indicating a shape about 20cm by 20cm. "Hence now I'm doing big twigs." The problem is that as the twigs get bigger, so do the pieces. The largest one to date is three metres by one metre and took eight months to make. "I nearly gave up artwork after that."
Wilson is, in the words of Herald art critic John McDonald, "one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary Australian art". Her fragile, intricate work is easy to like, and at exhibitions at Manly Regional Art Gallery and Museum and Michael Nagy Fine Art in Woollahra, people typically respond with a series of "oohs" and "aahs". There is the "ooh" as they realise that her shimmering chain-mail-style net is made from fish scales sewn together. There is the
"aah" that comes from discovering an assemblage resembling the surface of the ocean is made from popped and dried bluebottles.
As people get up close, captivation by the novelty of her work gives way to a kind of awe at the effort involved. Have you ever tried hand-stitching pieces of dried seaweed together?
Finally - and for Wilson, this is the important bit - people are astonished by the materials themselves, by the colours in sea urchin shells, for example, or the faded glory of pressed hydrangea flowers. "It makes something very usual and everyday, special," she says. Wilson spends much of the summer and autumn collecting while walking along the beach or in the bush near her home. She rarely sets out to forage for a particular thing, just picking up whatever catches her eye - a bird claw or a leaf - and things can sit around her studio for years before she works out what she wants to do with them. In winter, she tends to hunker down and put the pieces together. Sometimes, she heads to the Blue Mountains to do something different.
Wilson trained in sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, but her work then was dominated by installations and after graduation she did public, conceptual art. "And realised kinda quickly that you just pour a whole lot of money into that and it's not really that wellappreciated," she says ruefully.
She switched tack when she discovered clay and has since done courses in glazing technology and made pottery an integral part of her practice. By the sea, she makes her collages of natural materials; in the mountains, she uses clay to construct more architectural works, like miniature fortresses, which often play around with the idea of buildings. Her next exhibition (at Moss Green in Melbourne, in November) will feature both types of pieces, which she
hopes "will create some kind of dialogue between them". The two sides of her output are also linked by small windows, which have become her
signature. It started when she had to make holes in her ceramic pieces to allow air to escape, and decided to turn them into a feature. Now all her pieces, including the assemblages, have a little square or rectangular niche cut into them, like a mysterious window. "It counteracts the naturalness of everything else. It's about your imagination going somewhere else. It's an escape route," she explains. Wilson, 41, was born in Scotland, but her family returned to Sydney when she was five. They lived in Manly, and her parents were avid bushwalkers. "I think that set me up for life. Mum was always going, 'Look at that' and getting into details of things on bushwalks. As a kid,you're just like, 'So what?' But now it's paid off."
Her father was an architect, but it was still unusual for her to turn to art. The way she tells it, though, it wasn't really a decision. Art was just something she did growing up and never quite stopped. "Sometimes I'll say I'm an artist by default. Most other people I went to college with could type or they had some other skill in some other area that they fell back on. And I'm kind of glad in a way that I didn't, because it's just forced me down this route."
Wilson got her break after she and her partner set up Federation Zen, a second-handfurniture and bric-a-brac shop in Clovelly. He concentrated on the furniture; she focused on finding artists to show their work and introduced pieces of her own. It worked well in the mid-'90s when the distressed/recycled look was in, and his furniture nicely complemented her assemblages reusing everyday materials. Soon the art (hers and other people's) became the main focus. In 1998, she got a dealer and closed the shop.
Wilson doesn't make a great living from her work and there is none of her art in the house because she has to sell everything she makes. Because her pieces take so long, she can make only two or three big works each year, or up to 20 small ones. Many people have suggested she get an assistant, but Wilson says this is impossible. "Because I work intuitively, a lot of the time I'm making a thing and I'm not really knowing why I'm making it, it's just a need to make it, an urge to make it."
Sometimes, it's not until years later that she realises why. Wilson says she becamefascinated by the idea of working on a small scale when she arrived in Kathmandu in 1989 and was feeling overwhelmed. "I was just walking down this street and there was a little niche in the wall with an icon in it. And I was looking at it, and I realised that everything else kind of dissolved while my attention was on this one little thing. I just thought, 'Wow, that's incredible it can have that effect.' That's when I first started looking for small things." It wasn't until she'd been working on small pieces for years, putting windows into each one, that she realised the windows, too, were a legacy of this moment - a recreation of that niche she saw in the wall.
Wilson says it's this process of revelation that keeps her interested in her art. When she begins a piece, she is never entirely sure where it will end up and that's where the excitement lies. With her first twig piece, for instance, she thought she was making a purely textural work but then a flowing, wave-like pattern emerged. "I was like, 'Of course! That's the water in the wood! That's how trees grow!"' She included waves in the entire series and called it Streamline.
For now, despite occasional stiffness from hunching over her work table, Wilson seems content to be secluded in her study, making her painstaking pieces. During her last exhibition, at Manly, visitors wrote messages in a comments book, which Wilson has photocopied and kept. "In my dark, lonely hours I'm going to get it out and read and think, That's what it's all for, that reaction.' To make that person feel that is amazing. I still firmly believe that I might put it together, but it's the beauty of nature that excites people when they see the work."