Works
A selection of projects spanning light installations, hybrid sculptural paintings, interactive digital environments, and video works exploring themes of memory, motion, and embodied experience.
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 • Digital print on Baryta photographic paper, ink, varnish
A modular suite of 7 works presented as a site-responsive installation at Oscilloforms , Project 8 Gallery, Melbourne, 2024. Wilson's engagement with technology is crucial to her artistic practice. Her tools are mechanical, automated, and manual, influenced by years of dance training and performing. Her hybrid use of mediums embraces the tangible while both utilising and challenging the expanding role of AI to decelerate production. The digital domain inspires her material creations, leading to the reprinting of photos or the repurposing of failed experiments. In Generation IV , Wilson delves into the transformative journey of a photograph from pinhole to digital to physical form, investigating montage, cutting, and reshaping. She places a significant emphasis on surfaces, exploring their role in the interaction with light within photographic practice and highlighting the immediacy of the moment through live reflections. The form of the works is in a state of constant flux, both in their creation and installation, momentarily altered by the dynamic effects of viewers' movement and light.
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.
Playing in the Shadows
2023 • Photo painting on Daguerreotype canvas, ink, varnish, AI-generated imagery
Playing in the Shadows is an installation of AI-generated photo paintings at North Fitzroy Library, dedicated to Moz. In a spirit of play, the aging artist performs for the camera in a photographic lighting studio. These images become the basic data used to instruct AI to produce different contexts, allowing the artist to relive youth through technology. Amidst reflections on a past life as a dancer and live performer, technology becomes the brush that revitalizes the aging body's capacity to dance once more. Light and shadow, coupled with materials and artificial intelligence, serve as the artist's tools. The exploration of the moment in photography, the merging of countless images through machine learning and AI, and the unique synergy between the virtual realms of AI, imagination, and play reflect on the gravitational pull of the physical and weightlessness and seeming agelessness of the virtual. Situated next to a children's library centre, Playing in the Shadows aims to connect youth and the aged through art and play.
Motion Signalling
2022 • Interactive installation, motion-capture technology, video projection
Motion Signalling was a solo exhibition at Articulate Gallery, Sydney, in 2022. This work explores the intersection of movement, light, and digital technology through interactive installations that respond to viewer presence and motion. The installation creates an immersive environment where projected light and digital imagery react to human movement, creating a dialogue between the viewer's body and the technological apparatus. The work investigates themes of surveillance, presence, and the ways in which our movements are tracked, recorded, and translated into digital signals. Through motion-capture technology and custom software, the installation transforms the gallery space into a responsive environment, where each gesture and movement triggers visual and sonic responses. This body of work continues the artist's investigation into hybrid forms of art-making that combine physical presence with digital mediation.
Spin into Being
2022 • Video projection, hybrid photography, VR installation
Spin into Being delves into the archive in a reinterpretation of themes and footage that have foregrounded the artist's work for decades. While the ocean is perpetually in a rhythmic cycle, it is also in a constant state of flux. From moment to moment, it is never the same, continually evolving and changing in both its physical state and appearance. Like bodies of water, the physical body is also in a state of perpetual permutation, both in spirit and anatomy. In this immersive photographic and video installation, the body is juxtaposed with and in nature. In capturing water in the ocean in the video work, Wilson symbiotically synchronizes her movements with the cadence of tidal motion. This synchronicity and the resulting shroud of water around her fuse body and nature. This elemental and metaphysical hybridity distills time, water, light and motion into a primal pulse. These elements, while ubiquitous, are fundamental to all life and material existence. Yet, in each manifestation, they are different, never appearing or combining in quite the same fashion. Water and air—so very commonplace, they hardly attract attention—yet they vouchsafe our very existence. Light and Movement In the installation, Spin into Being wraps viewers in light, with reflected tessellations enveloping them on ceiling, walls and the floor. The encompassing, ebbing pulse of kaleidoscopic water is furthered by the rhythmic gesture of collecting and dispersing water in the video piece. This translates to the physical motion of spinning that produces the photographic images. The centrifugal thus becomes dually generative. The vast expanse of the natural world in which the artist moves body and camera becomes condensed into lines that run throughout the images. These linear wisps of light convey a profound eloquence as the entropy of the world is purified into a single line. These lines of light echo the horizon line of the ocean. At the boundary of water and sky, one is reflected into the other, just as the photographs mirror boundaries between the physical world and its intangible inscription through light. Virtual Reality Experience In the VR piece, viewers are invited to delve further into this elemental synergy. Within virtual space, the viewer is able to feel what it is like to be inside the camera and experience the elemental alchemy that is photography. In this space, the body is transcended, becoming part of the atomic interplay. The dialogue between pieces in Spin into Being reflects on cycles of aging and existence. In the mark making with light, there is an affirmation of the vitality of our existence and cohesion in the natural world. Yet, there is also a profound humility in this realization that our existence is but one small iteration in the enduring, omnipresence of nature. The earth, ocean and sky synthesized in the horizon have existed long before us and shall continue to do so in an endless expanse long after we cease to be. Catalogue essay by Anna Shimshak. Solo exhibition at Five Walls Gallery, Footscray (March 2-19, 2022). This body of work includes photographic prints, video projection, bespoke screen and Oculus Rift VR work.
if you stay where you are you'll run into yourself
2019 • Torch, domestic fan, polystyrene plinth, polystyrene screen, film, video, sound/speaker
if you stay where you are you'll run into yourself is a kinetic sculpture that explores the interplay of light, motion, and domestic objects to create dynamic visual effects in space. The work consists of a torch mounted on a domestic fan, placed on a cylindrical polystyrene plinth. The torch emits light while the fan's rotation creates a constantly shifting pattern of illumination. When projected onto a polystyrene screen, the moving light creates multicolored, rainbow-like circular patterns that transform the gallery space. This piece examines how simple, everyday objects—a torch, a fan—can be repurposed to generate complex, mesmerizing visual experiences. The continuous circular motion suggests both repetition and variation, echoing the work's title: the paradox of movement that brings you back to where you started, yet transforms everything in the process. The work was exhibited as part of a solo exhibition at Toot Art Space, St Kilda, and also presented at Geelong After Dark festival at Geelong Town Hall in 2019. The work continues the artist's investigation into hybrid forms that blend sculpture, light, video, and installation practices.
Algorhythmia
2021 • Digital image on canvas, photographic rug
Algorhythmia is a solo exhibition at Polaris Gallery, South Yarra, exploring the relationship between body, motion, and algorithmic processes through digital pinhole photography. The exhibition features large-scale digital images on canvas and a photographic rug, continuing the artist's long-running series of works that began with Fly Rhythm at Arc One Gallery in 2013. The digital pinhole images capture the spinning body in motion, creating abstract patterns of light that merge the physical and the digital. With catalogue essays by Ouyang Yu and Anna Shimshak, the exhibition explores how the body's rhythmic movements can be translated into visual form through photographic technology, creating works that exist at the intersection of dance, photography, and digital art.
Presencing
2020 • Light, video projection, photography
Presencing is a collaborative installation with Aaron Hoffman at The Project Space, Geelong, exploring the nature of presence and perception through light and motion-based photographic processes. The work investigates how we become present to ourselves and our environment, using photographic technology as a tool for heightened awareness. Through the interplay of light, movement, and the body, the installation creates a meditative space that invites viewers to slow down and attend to the subtle qualities of their perceptual experience.
Seeking not Looking
2019 • Photography, video
Seeking not Looking was a solo exhibition at Mars Gallery, Melbourne, curated by Brie Trenerry. The exhibition explores the distinction between active seeking and passive looking — the idea that artistic practice demands a mode of attention that goes beyond mere visual consumption. Through photographic and video works, the installation invites viewers to engage with the act of perception itself. Using her signature approach of moving the body and camera in unison, Wilson creates images that dissolve the boundary between subject and object, inviting the viewer into a state of heightened visual awareness.
Richmanpoorman
2018 • Light installation, video projection
Richmanpoorman was presented as part of Geelong After Dark at The Project Space, Geelong. The installation explores themes of wealth, value, and perception through light-based photographic and video processes. Using the darkness of the after-hours event as a canvas, the work transforms the gallery space into an immersive environment of projected light and shadow.
Witness
2017 • Digital pinhole photograph on Museo Portfolio Rag, silent site-responsive video projection
Witness is a digital pinhole photograph with silent site-responsive video projection. The work was created as part of Anne Scott Wilson's ongoing exploration of the body's relationship to light and the camera, using pinhole photography to dissolve conventional representation into pure sensation. The work favours material accident over conventional representation, presenting the photograph as a register of natural events and chance processes. By allowing the body and elements of the environment to steer and inflect the photographic process, Wilson counters the controlling influence of the camera, producing results that are spontaneous and subjective — a passage from exterior observation to interior reality.
Every Day I Wait #3
2017 • Video, photography, installation
Every Day I Wait #3 was presented at the Museum of Brisbane, exploring themes of anticipation, waiting, and the passage of time. The installation uses photographic and video processes to create an immersive environment that reflects on the experience of waiting — a universal human condition that exists between action and stillness, presence and absence. Through the interplay of light, projection, and carefully composed imagery, the work invites viewers into a contemplative space.
Inside the Matrix: a tango with light
2016 • Digital pinhole photography, video
Inside the Matrix: a tango with light was a solo exhibition at Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney, with an essay by Sean Redmond. The exhibition explores the internal processes of photography — the relationship between light, lens, and sensor — as a tango between artist and technology. Wilson's digital pinhole photographs capture the dance of light within the camera itself, creating abstract compositions that reveal the hidden mechanics of the photographic act. The title references both the digital matrix of pixels that compose a digital photograph and the physical matrix of the camera's sensor, drawing parallels between technological and bodily processes of perception.
The Sound of One Foot Tapping
2016 • Photography, video, installation
The Sound of One Foot Tapping was a solo exhibition at The Stockroom, Kyneton. The exhibition explores the intersection of rhythm, movement, and the body through photographic and video installations. Drawing on the artist's background in dance and choreography, the work investigates the visual rhythms that emerge when the body moves through space, captured and transformed through photographic technology. The title alludes to the Zen koan of the sound of one hand clapping, re-imagined through the lens of dance and bodily movement.
Fly Rhythm
2013 • Digital pinhole photography
Fly Rhythm was a solo exhibition at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, featuring digital pinhole photographs that explore the rhythmic patterns of light, movement, and the body in natural environments. This exhibition marked the beginning of a series of works exploring the digital pinhole process, which Wilson has continued to develop through subsequent exhibitions including InsideOut , Inside the Matrix , Algorhythmia , and Fugitive States . With catalogue essays by Melissa Bianca Amore and Will Johncock, the exhibition presents photographs that capture the elemental interplay of water, light, and the moving body — creating abstract compositions that transcend traditional photographic representation.
InsideOut #2
2012 • Video, painting, pinhole photography
InsideOut #2 was a solo exhibition at Post Office Gallery, Ballarat, combining video, painting, and pinhole photography. The exhibition explores the relationship between interior psychological states and exterior physical reality, using multiple mediums to create a layered dialogue between different modes of perception and representation. The works move between the virtual and the physical, the internal and the external, creating a space where these categories become fluid and interchangeable.
Frayed
2011 • Photography, video, installation
Frayed was a solo exhibition at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, with an essay by Melissa Bianca Amore. The exhibition explores themes of unravelling, impermanence, and material transformation — the point at which things begin to come apart and new forms emerge from the dissolution of the old. Through photographic and video processes, the work examines the frayed edges between mediums, between representation and abstraction, between the physical and the virtual.
Conversation
2010 • Video, photography
Conversation was a solo exhibition at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, featuring video and photographic works. The work explores dialogue between the body, technology, and the natural environment. The video piece "Conversation" (2008) was later featured in the touring group exhibition Selectively Revealed , curated by Asialink and Experimenta in 2011–2012. Through the lens of conversation — both as verbal exchange and as a broader metaphor for the interplay between different elements — the work examines how the body communicates with its environment through movement and gesture.
SoundingOut
2009 • Video, sound installation
SoundingOut was a solo exhibition at Kings Artist Run Initiative, Melbourne, exploring the intersections of sound, movement, and visual rhythm. Through video and sound-based works, the installation investigates how auditory and visual perception interrelate — how the rhythms of sound can be visualised and the patterns of vision can be heard. The work reflects the artist's background in dance and choreography, translating the embodied experience of rhythm into visual and sonic form.