Anne Scott Wilson
Artist | Researcher | Curator
Exploring Light, Movement, and Embodied Experience
My practice spans immersive light installations, hybrid sculptural paintings, and interactive digital environments. Working at the intersection of technology and phenomenological experience, I create works that explore themes of memory, motion, and spatial perception.
Featured Works
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Lift
2025 • Interactive video and motion-capture installation
Lift began through a deeply reflective process, revisiting my own history as a dancer across diverse styles, including classical ballet. My conversations with former Australian Ballet Principal Artist Lisa Bolte became central to the work's development. We spoke about ballet not only as a technique but as a lived experience—how it shapes the body, imagination, and sense of self over time. Lisa features in the video as a mature and seasoned artist, bringing a depth of experience rarely seen in representations of ballet. Her presence challenges narrow ideas of who gets to perform ballet and how it is seen. Her dance voice—both literal and metaphorical—guided the work as we considered how the form might evolve beyond the traditional image of the ballerina. Lift is an interactive video and motion-capture work that invites audiences to experience a sensation often hidden within the form: the feeling of weightlessness. Ballet trains the body to lift, extend, and reach beyond its limits—calling on imagination as much as physical strength. Through performance, editing, and movement, Lift draws on embodied memory and lived experience. It invites reflection on how the language of ballet might continue to move—through time, through bodies, and through the traces it leaves behind. Reflection by Lisa Bolte Working with Anne, whose creative ideas are so distinctive and evocative, invited me into a deeply collaborative process at a pivotal time in my life—when I had stepped away from my professional career with The Australian Ballet. It was a transition, and Anne's vision offered me a new way to explore movement, stillness, and presence. When I look at the video, I feel an endless, quiet sense of gratitude. The work holds space for stillness and reflection. It captures something both fragile and powerful in the passage of time. When I first met Anne Scott Wilson, she was intent on creating art that embodied metamorphosis. From the beginning, she spoke of ideas and images that evoked the Dying Swan or a butterfly slowly disintegrating. There was beauty in the decay, in the waiting, in the tension between timelessness and fragility. Her ideas touched on the vulnerability of being, and of life itself. It has captured the imagination, it holds a suspended moment that seems to go on forever, a poetic meditation on presence and impermanence. Featured in "Beyond the Ballerina" at Wyndham Art Gallery, Werribee, curated by Dr Megan Evans and Olivia Poloni (10 October – 21 December 2025).
Generation IV
2024 • Hybrid photograph, Bartyx archival paper, D-rings, ink, varnish
Modular suite of 7 works, site responsive installation at Oscillaforms, Project@ Gallery Melbourne. This work explores hybrid photographic practices, combining archival printing techniques with physical interventions using D-rings, ink, and varnish on Bartyx archival paper.
Fugitive States
2023 • Hybrid photographic works: inkjet prints on daguerreotype canvas with ink, varnish, and pinhole photography
Fugitive States is an exhibition that explores a perceived state of entanglement between sentient beings and technology. Using primitive and hi end digital photographic methods, Wilson deconstructs the virtual to haul it back into the physical. In a punk DIY aesthetic, the works use a variety of approaches to intervene in the photographic act. In this context the camera, its technology, hardware and software are considered an extension of the body's intelligence. Wilson considers the virtual in all its forms to break free from photography's tradition of 'capturing', 'documenting', and 'representing'. She has taken her entanglement with the virtual and the physical into photo paintings in which the act of playing with light through a camera is continued into the printed pinhole image, and reinterpreted through new mediums, in remembrance of the act of photography. Similarly, the virtual is made physical by employing gravity as an essential element in the artefacts. Photo and kinetic sculptures juxtapose the lightness of light with the heaviness of the material of the print – canvas in these works. They are made subject to the forces of gravity and movement. Any ambient movement (audience or natural forces) will spin the sculptures revealing different viewpoints in synergy with the body. Likewise, wind from a video projector spins the lightweight film on which a pinhole photo has been printed. The light pushes through the spinning photo onto the walls – lights agile motion set in play by the hardware. This body of work is experimental and fun with references to Robert Morris, Richard Tuttle, Iva Genzken and Lucio Fontana and while this is, in part, homage, the key break here is with photography and the conventional limits we place on form. Anne Scott Wilson 2023 |||ESSAY_SEPARATOR||| Liminality is simultaneously a beautifully evocative word and an overused trope in contemporary art. A sort of provisional lushness that oscillates between things, between binary oppositions or opposing forms, the idea of the liminal or activating liminal spaces is to elevate this mysterious gap between tectonic plates. Underpinning this approach is the proposition that what exists in this nebulous grey zone, is the preeminent terrain for artistic exploration. In part, this scurrying towards points of becoming, gathering on a muddy non-site neither land nor sea, is a carry-over from the deconstruction of language as an instrument of power. To be one thing or another is to adhere to the logic of binary oppositions, but to pick at the space in-between is to resist and perhaps erode the credibility of such formations. Yet beyond this ideological reading of reshaping power relations, the liminal is also a poetic space of possibility where meaning is made at a series of incompatible junctures. Things that are not supposed to easily cohere or connect whether they be figuration and abstraction, photography and painting are elided. To value liminality as an approach is to question the orthodoxies of art history and theory and specifically its categorisations and compartmentalisations. The ethos of separating and delineating one thing from another, a movement, a medium, a technique, while framed as an imperative for order and organisation, is always a contrivance and continually subject to artistic defenestration. Anne Scott Wilson is very aware of this complex and contested terrain and is only too happy to pressure test artistic convention and categorisation. While her hybrid photography/ sculptural forms articulate a respect for discipline and negotiate a spectrum of histories, they are at the same time a forensic dissection of the blind spots within and between these fields of practice. In choosing to utilise a medium – photography – saturated with an imperative to represent, as a mechanism depict or capture so-called fragments of 'the real' world against itself, seems at first glance to be wilfully perverse. Wilson's objects are fascinated with the history of non-representational art, with colour, line, juxtaposition, and composition Why use the technology of photography with its allure of representation to blur and obfuscate, to make the real radically abstract? The same could be said for the utilisation of photographic paper as a sculptural form. Why activate the three-dimensional qualities of the photographic print when other materials (felt, fabric even plastic) might be more appropriate? The answer to both questions is that the reach and elasticity of photography is infinitely greater than its popularly understood parameters. The technology of photography offers us potentially new understandings of colour, new ways of bleeding chroma and confusing the spatial orientation of figure/ground relationships. There is a delicious irony that photography is now mining its capacity for the non-representational considering painting was manoeuvred into this territory by the invention of this upstart mechanism in the late 19th century. Ceding representation of 'the real' to the camera, painting for much of the 20th century felt comfortable in the division of labour. 'We handle the abstract, you can capture the quasi-mimetic forms of modern life' was the unspoken, if mutually convenient, compact. For a long time, this delineation held, but the imperative for artistic defenestration is indeed a strong one and the imperative to test the limits will always trump nomenclature. Wilson has come to understand the resonant power of the camera as a mechanism to capture what is of this world and make it otherworldly. Her fields of colour are always bending, warping, and folding over themselves, emitting at times both a luxurious liquidity and a starkness of separation. She is seduced by the expressive potential of the photographic surface, part mirror, part receding void, and understands that this surface can take us to places painting by its nature is not easily inclined to reach. The modern inkjet printer with its capacity to spit ever greater levels of information on to incrementally larger sheets of photographic paper, is a tool that opens new understandings of colour and composition. For Wilson, it is a mechanism to expand the syntax of abstraction, to push into new formal atmospheres that braid the analogue and the digital together. Her compound objects offer a connective tissue across a disparate terrain whereby photography, sculpture, painting, and film are less discrete disciplines, than allied modalities capable of being quantised together to construct new polyvalent artistic forms. Catalogue essay by David Cross. Solo exhibition at ACU Gallery, Fitzroy (August - October 2023). This body of work includes hybrid photographic works combining inkjet prints on daguerreotype canvas with ink, varnish, and pinhole photography.
Fugue
2023 • Unique pinhole photo painting on canvas
Fugue 001 is a unique pinhole photo painting on canvas, created in 2023. This work was exhibited in "Women in Abstraction" at Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne. The artwork explores the intersection of analogue photography and painting techniques, creating hybrid works that blur the boundaries between photographic capture and painterly gesture. The subtle interplay of light and form creates a contemplative, meditative quality. View the full exhibition catalogue (PDF) for more information about this work and the exhibition.
Multi-Disciplinary Practice
My work encompasses a range of mediums and approaches, united by an exploration of perception and experience.
Light Installations
Immersive environments exploring spatial and temporal perception
Hybrid Paintings
Featured in Oscilloforms exhibition at Project@ Gallery Melbourne
Interactive Works
Motion capture and digital environments using Unreal Engine
Video Works
Moving image explorations of movement and embodiment
Interested in Collaborating?
I welcome inquiries from curators, galleries, and institutions regarding exhibitions, commissions, and collaborative projects.
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