A Margaret Wilson Retrospective
Margaret Wilson’s work is multi-layered, in appearance and meaning. On one hand her paintings and works on paper are luminous and transparent, while on the other, they are configured/veiled with passages that suggest depths of feeling. She engages with the senses: seeing, hearing, even tasting; these pictures are richly sensual. Indicative in the exhibition title, Thresholds, the imagery also touches on liminality and how human experience encompasses entrances, boundaries, peripheries and limits. The selected works included in this retrospective range from the early 1980s to 2012, for the most part in series, and include paintings, both in oil and synthetic polymer, drawings in watercolour, pastel, graphite, black and white linocuts and multi-coloured screen-prints. In the accompanying catalogue, curator Anne Kirker writes ‘The formal and emotional register of her paintings, drawings, artist’s books and prints, ranges according to external stimuli…’.1
Wilson’s ability to externalise her internal responses to place and its specialness is perhaps due to a working process identified by Kirker as a form of visual poetry. In a process similar to ‘mind-mapping’ the artist elicits and then distils the myriad associations she brings to landscape, be they rhythms, sensations of light and particular colours and elemental structures. The artist’s physical response to moving north to Townsville from Sydney in 1982-83, was immediate. As is evident in works such as Red in the morning (1985), Wilson describes her first experiences of ‘flying over huge distances in the shimmering heat of the Gulf’, and the immense space of outback cattle stations, as feeling that one has ‘a fleeting presence in a land of infinite continuity’. In Station Drawing 1 (1985) the parched landscape is manifest in the media used: graphite