Dr Sarah Kate Wilson

Profession

BA Painting Senior Lecturer

College

Camberwell College of Arts

Person Type

Staff

Biography

Sarah Kate Wilson, is an artist, researcher, curator, teacher, collaborator. She completed her MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art (2010), and Practice based PhD at University of Leeds (2017). She is Senior Lecturer of BA Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.

Practice:She approaches painting in an expanded sense, and refers to the medium as LIVE and time-based. She works across a variety of media, painting, print, ceramics, textiles and performance using; wool, wax, cosmic glazes, holographic surfaces, inks, acrylic paint, survival blankets, fossils. Her LIVE, performative paintings involve costumes, shells, food, water, strobe lights, glass prisms, fire, text, instruments, voice, mirrors, and audience participation. She explores subjects; shapeshifting, animal mimicry, atmospheric phenomena, the cosmos and Earth’s history.

She has staged Painting Performances at major international arts institutions; Palais de Tokyo (Paris) 2017, Royal Academy of Arts (London) 2018, BALTIC 39, (Newcastle) 2016. For the Museum of London, (2018) she produced a performance with fifty singers on the streets of London. In 2019 she undertook a Research Residency at the Bauhaus Building (Unesco site) Dessau, Germany where she focused on the history of the Stage Curriculum at Bauhaus. Following this she staged performances with staff and Camberwell BA Fine Art students in Germany to launch the new Bauhaus Museum, (2019) opened by Chancellor A. Merkle.

She recently received Developing Your Creative Practice, Arts Council Funding to produce a Set, that functions as a stage for performances, and a display system for paintings, ceramics, and tapestries. She is Artist in Residence at West Dean College, Chichester, producing a ‘ballet’, on the subject of mimicry. Whilst in residence at Xenia Creative retreat (2023), she developed costumes for the Ballet. Episodes of the ballet will be staged in 2024 in the Gardens of West Dean and at Koba Chika, Tokyo, Japan where she will be in Artist in Residence in Spring 2024.

Curatorial Practice:

Wilson also curates - In 2015-16 she curated Painting in Time, which toured from The Tetley, Leeds, to the Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Artists Polly Apfelbaum, Debo Eilers, Lisa Milroy, Yoko Ono. Through other curatorial projects she has also worked with Lubaina Himid, Rose Wylie, Martin Creed, and Phyllida Barlow.

Research - Papers and Publications:

She recently gave a paper at the Teaching Painting Conference: Painting the New, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and in 2019 along with Dr Joanne Crawford will convene a session on painting at the annual Association for Art History conference.

She has delivered research papers at CAA Annual Conference, Chicago (2020), Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis, Camberwell College of Art (2019) and Teaching Painting Conference, Royal Academy London (2018). She co-convened a panel at the Association of Art History, Brighton (2019). Her writing has been published, in The

Journal of Contemporary Painting (2020), ‘Fully Awake’, Freelands Foundation (2019), and is due to be included in ‘Teaching Painting: Painting The New’, Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming (2024).

Writing by others:

Recent writing on Wilson’s work by Donal Moloney

Sarah Kate Wilson; Braiding the wind, by Donal Moloney 2023

The surfaces of Wilson’s Mimicry Paintings, such as Alucinari, Crypsis, and Iridophores, address me with braidings of flatness and depth through intense layering. One cannot isolate one strata of colour from its adjacent. Layers appear to be built up and worked back into with a mixture of pigments, inks and waxes. It is clear that a lot of searching has gone into bringing these the surfaces to this point. They appear found rather than orchestrated. I believe that Wilson did not enter a final destination into her studio ‘Sat Nav’; instead she’s just left the driveway and cajoled her materials into a form of liquid-like compass and map.

I feel that if I look away, these painterly ‘fields’ will change. Maybe, (like anything we at look closely in nature), it’s because I can’t quite take in all the visual information at once. All this suggests the paintings locating us in some other idea of time not often associated with painting. Not the chronological time we experience in everyday life or the fragmented and exaggerated temporality of dreaming, rather, a more glacial notion of time.

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