Half Sleep I

Wilson’s work explores the relationship between abstraction and memory, always starting with a series of drawings. Whether these are observational field notes or from memory, they have a provisional feeling to them, as though glimpsed whilst on the move. He uses flashes of colour and minimal mark-making to make visual phrases, often cutting and re-assembling them in unexpected ways through collage. The compositions that emerge from this process, even in their fragmented state, retain a sense of the places that inspired them. After a period of immersion, with this research material pinned to the studio wall, intuition plays its part in deciding how to develop it.

Often produced in series, his works tend towards the graphical and urban, with fields of colour in carefully-selected colour palettes, laid over hard-edged relief elements. There are echoes of British Constructionism within its ‘assembled’ nature alongside its preoccupation with harmony, pattern and rhythm.

Other works can bear more recognisable hallmarks of landscape. Painterly gestures that speak of mountains, valleys and coastlines are interrupted with sudden cuts, hard-edges and mismatches. This mimics the way memories of places are prone to abstraction and yet our sense of those places remain familiar and vivid. The eye searches for continuity between the ‘broken’ parts which in turn gives the impression of the passing of time. When present, the sculptural relief elements provide a rhythmic structure to the image-making.