Generation IV
Artist in conversation — process and ideas
About This Work
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.
In the Studio
Series 001 — Failed Prints as Still Life
I've collected and reused failed photographic prints that lay on top of a reflective surface, scrunched up — subjects for a new photograph. Putting these 'still lives' together, I found I needed to employ a sense developed as a dancer, especially during training: finding how the forms could balance and sit in synergy with gravity while thinking of them in 360 degrees, so that from each viewing point a kind of 'sweet spot' needed to operate.
Series 002 — Pinhole, Slash, Rephotograph
Inspired by Lucio Fontana's sliced canvases and light-drawing photographs, I take a long exposure pinhole image. The print is reinscribed repeatedly — blurring the lines between its virtual and physical existence, oscillating between two and three dimensions. Double-sided prints, approximately 180 × 180 cm, are slashed and hung in space.
Series 003 — AI and the Handmade
The original image is a failed experiment — a 'real' photograph with a word-prompted AI background. A rising watercolour gradient of diffuse yellow and blue. Printed, inked and varnished, painted on the underside, slashed, hung, rephotographed. The whole process is repeated. The work oscillates between the digital and the handmade, each iteration drawing the image further from its origin.