Samstag Museum catalogue | Shona Wilson

View catalogue - Jenny Sages and Shona Wilson

 Shona Wilson
Born 1964, Edinburgh, Scotland
Lives NSW mid-north coast

The fragile beauty of Shona Wilson’s assemblages attests to an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the miniature detail of nature and to the "small, the overlooked, the by-passed". She creates wondrously delicate compositions of found natural materials, many collected on beaches along the Australian coastline. Wilson has worked with a diverse array of organic materials, including insect wings, ferns, twigs, seed pods, bones, dried blue bottles and even fish scales.

Her approach to re-arranging nature has some affinities with Andy Goldsworthy. Like Goldsworthy, Wilson has an eye for the innate beauty of pattern, line and colour in nature and an intuitive sense of placement to create harmonious, balanced compositions. However, in contrast to Goldsworthy’s minimalist interventions, Wilson manipulates and combines natural elements to create formal abstract compositions that are the obverse of natural haphazard arrangements. Her art has a beauty and an ineffable dimension which is distinct from – and not imitative of – nature. It is the transparent artifice of her assemblages which isolates and re-contextualises each small natural element so that its beauty can be perceived. This effect is sometimes called the ‘heightened reality’ of art.

Her group of three wall sculptures and two miniatures in Abstract Nature is drawn from Macroscope, her solo exhibition at King Street Gallery, Sydney, in late 2009. Each work is a contemporary interpretation of the microscopic organisms known as diatoms which were illustrated by Ernst Haeckel in his pioneering work on the ecology of organic life, Art Forms in Nature (1899). In the catalogue for Macroscope she explains part of the fascination of the diatoms: "Magnified, these wondrous structures reveal universal patterns and forms which are seen in cross-cultural Indigenous imagery and new scientific theory." Each diatom is fabricated with exquisite delicacy from natural elements, including twigs, seeds, Norfolk pine, and seed pods. In each work she inserts a small piece made from plastic; this is a reminder of the impossibility of nature in a pristine state, unmediated by human impact.

Shona Wilson graduated with a major in sculpture from Sydney College of the Arts in 1990 and subsequently did further studies in jewellery and ceramics. She has held twelve solo exhibitions since 1994 and first came to the attention of a wider public with her 2005 solo exhibition at Manly Regional Art Gallery and Museum. Her work is in the collection of Artbank as well as several significant private collections.