The twelve canvases which comprise Margaret Wilson’s latest exhibition ‘Sounding’ revitalise an aesthetic of the senses. Abstract art, and painting in particular, with intentional metaphysical and aesthetic dimensions has waxed and waned during the course of modernist endeavour. Cyclical fashions have routinely obscured its presence to give room to, for instance, the didactic social arena, the assertion of new narratives, transgressive experiments in form and displays of spectacular innovation. Wilson’s project has in the face of this, determinedly pursued imagery that visually evokes ‘shimmers of awareness’ through sensations of place, links with music and the power of the ‘limen’ or threshold to suggest transition and fluidity between one state and another.
During the eighties to the mid-nineties, for example, when the artist was based in Townsville, it was the experience of intense heat and of parched earth that produced large-scale acrylics in landscape format.1 Often vivid in hue (vermillion and cadmium orange), her colours were sometimes muted as though echoing the sudden chill of a desert night. However, in all cases the painted surfaces were atmospherically nuanced and finished with brushwork that cut through like a fine accented rod, a taut cord or arrowed trajectory. Titles related to place but more especially they indicated—as Whistler had done with his Nocturnes—a symbiosis between the beauty of natural phenomena and aural sensation.
In the 1980s, Wilson had titled a number of her canvases Resonance and again, linkages to musical forms appeared in the artist’s Elementum sensus series of 1997 which began ‘with the notion of four senses, touch, sight, hearing and taste, and the transformative possibilities of the elements of fire, earth, air and water. Each work has its own