Camilla Wilson

Personal statement

Camilla Wilson’s painting finds its focus in the space of the interior. She has configured the interior as a stage-like setting, the place of potential action, historical narrative, occupied by passed or multiple moments, and augmented, fractured, in reflection.

Recent painting embodies both the desire for an interior space and the negotiation of a representational language appropriate to this. These are forms of ruin, places in transition between one state and the next, open to an ambiguity of reading and spatial experience. The paintings figure no human presence, but yet invoke its traces. The emphasis is upon the sense of inhabiting; inhabiting the space, and the image as a space.

"The 'Uncanny' is not a property of space itself, nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of real and unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming’.¹

The sense that these interiors are not self-evident arises from the feeling that we might be looking at stage sets rather than actual interiors. Sometimes, the paintings work to delay recognition on the part of a viewer; there is an uncertainty as to their reality. Heightened colour emphasises a sense of spatial dislocation. Sometimes, the places appear obsolete, unbound by function, defamiliarised, and so are free to take on new, chimerical qualities.

These paintings are in a sense fragments. Just as ruins do, they refer to a lost whole. The painted language here seeks to elaborate the incomplete as complete. As Peter Osborne refers to the fragment, "The independence of each individual fragment from others figures the idea of totality, from which the ensemble or collection of fragments derives both its necessity - as an externally imposed or constructed unity of a multiplicity, the unity of a montage - and its own sense of incompletion".²

Like a dream space, eliding boundaries of real and unreal, the work suggests that inhabiting an interior is more a psychological than a physiological state. Experience is collapsed into a moment, a moment is lived by an image, and the image extended through painting.

Camilla has been a Jerwood Contemporary Painters finalist and has shown her work solo in London at Fordham, Laurent Delaye, as well as in group shows at the Herbert Read gallery, Metropole Galleries, ArtSway, Salford, Dunkirk and Cardiff amongst others; and outside the UK in Cologne, Vienna, Maribor and Berlin. She has also curated exhibitions, amongst which were "Of and For" at the Bank, and "Mirei" in Unit 2, Whitechapel, with the artist Mary Maclean. Aside from lecuring at Bath School of Art and Design, Camilla has taught at Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Goldsmiths College, Kent Institute of Art and Design, and Holbaek Kunsthøjskolen in Denmark. 

¹ Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, MIT Press 1992, p11
² Peter Osborne , Anywhere or Not At All, Verso 2013, p60

Academic qualifications

• MFA Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, 1999
• BA Fine Art (first class honours), Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, 1997
• BA French/Italian (first class honours) QMW, London University, 1990.

Professional memberships

• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Bath Spa University employment

• 2008-present.

Other external roles

• Lecturer at The Cass, London Metropolitan University.

Area of expertise

• Painting.

Other research outputs

Reviews/exhibition catalogue entries:

• Jerwood Contemporary Painters (catalogue), 2007
• Zoo Art Fair (catalogue), 2005
• Mark Gisbourne, "The Contemporaries’ Contemporaries", Contemporary Visual Art, Issue 17.

Awards:

• 2003 Studio residency, Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany
• 2000 Awarded an ACAVA studio for one year.

Collections:

• Paintings in private collections in London, New York and Tokyo.