Introductory essay for catalogue for Kate’s solo exhibition “Total Rubbish” Morley Gallery Oct 29th - Nov 21st 2024

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DISREGARDED

PETER S SMITH

''An important part of my work tends to be autobiographical - a way of exploring what it means to be alive." Wilson 1

 "The artist finds a way behind words, concepts and rational explanations in his/her repeated search for an innocent re-encounter with the world." Juhani Pallasmaa 2

Having lived in London since 1988, Kate Wilson's earlier works explore the familiar in her own life and the urban environment. There are strong compositions, often full of movement, depicting the Underground, parks, streets, buses, rivers and domestic/family situations. There is usually a narrative thread in which visual metaphor plays an important role.

In the 2023 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, one of Kate's very small paintings of discarded coffee cup plastic lids was awarded the Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting. It was from a series made over four years in response to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath. This exhibition of paintings and drawings is a selection from that body of work.

The Covid situation, with its lockdown and restraints on movement, made the familiar unfamiliar. In Planted and Green Shoots the streets are shown as empty, with the trees, street signs and municipal vegetation left to their own devices. Keeping distance from fellow travellers meant proximity to other things. On Underground train platforms this placed her closer to rubbish bins, with their transparent bags.3She describes her response as she slowly realised these bins were worth looking at.

"When empty, the translucent plastic blew and inflated as trains drew into the station, reminding me of wedding veils. Half full, I could peer inside and examine their contents. It was a bit like scrutinising an x-ray of inside the human body. When full, distorted by so many cups, newspapers, packaging and tins, these same bags took on the aspect of a stout matron, or a well-fed sturdy baby" 4

In her own teaching and practice Kate Wilson is an advocate for looking very closely at what is being observed. These are personal encounters with her surroundings rather than disinterested observations. Paying close attention includes choices in what to record and how to record it. The challenge was how to draw and paint these kinds of moving translucent, reflective, transparent surfaces as well as the fragmented and crushed objects within. Kate sought inspiration in the National Gallery, looking at how Dutch and Italian masters painted veils and fabrics. She also found Norman Bryson's book, Looking at the Overlooked (1990), enlightening. He describes how still life painting by the 17th century Spanish painters Zurbaran and Catan, gave worth to the ordinary and disregarded. These were paintings of humble and overlooked things. Could rubbish be given similar care and attention?

Kate has chosen not to over emphasise the unpleasant, dirty or negative aspects of the rubbish nor to take an approach similar to Pop Art, which in many ways celebrated consumer culture. Instead she has chosen to explore their constantly changing appearance; empty, full to the brim or distorted by the movement of passing trains. Bridal Bin Bag is a wonderful example, exploring translucency and reflection while the veil of plastic is securely held by the rusty orange clip.

Having become aware of the world of the rubbish bag, rubbish thrown down in the street also caught her attention. She collects discarded coffee cup lids, juice and water bottle caps, paper bags and plastic containers to take back into the studio to paint and draw. In a fascinating way, less can become more, as these single items take centre stage.

Despite being squashed and broken, they have been treated as special and painted with great care and affection. These paintings reveal some of the ambiguities we face, often leaving us with a love-hate relationship with these encounters.

Perhaps the nearest any of Kate's work comes to social commentary is her series of paintings where a clear wrapper or container has fallen over growing grass. This forces the green shoots to push through cracks in the plastic. Even here that may be incidental to an exploration of the visual contrast between the living and the inert. Her most recent paintings focus on paper food wrappings which become diaphanous veils as the weather gradually melts them into the pavement. Their shallow space seems to absorb us as we look down into the translucent layers and changing colours. Memento mori, as well as intimating our own mortality, can also remind that life is precious.

Any beauty found in these paintings and drawings is perhaps not in the rubbish as such. It remains rubbish with all the associated connotations. The beauty lies in the painterly choices and way of depiction. Things abandoned as worthless have been given a new life as paintings. Here is a kind of redemption.

"Artistic ideas arise from an existential understanding and desire, they are not ideational or translatable into verbal interpretations or explanations. They are embodied existential metaphors." 5

This observation by Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish architect, is clearly reminding us that the arts cannot be translated into verbal interpretations or explanations. Answers to any questions we may have are in the paintings and drawings themselves. In an essay A Bar at the Folies-Bergere - Modernism and storytelling Philip Pullman suggests that

"Great art has always had this double character, this ability to look at the world and to look at itself at the same time, and the greatest art is perhaps where we see the two things in perfect balance." 6

In Kate Wilson's work we are invited to pay close attention to her imaginative disclosures in response to things carefully seen and deeply felt and to their physicality and beauty as paintings and drawings.

NOTES

1.   Wilson, Kate, Regarding the Disregarded, (Epiphany Magazine, Summer 2024, Ed.John Bateson) 4-6

 2.   Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Thinking Hand, (John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2009), 127

 3.   There is an element of social history in the use of transparent rubbish bags on the London Underground. During the three decades long IRA bombing campaign in London and UK cities, following a bomb in a rubbish bin at Victoria Station in 1991, rubbish bins were removed from stations. The transparent plastic bins began to be used in some stations from 2011.

 4.   ibid

 5.   Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Embodied Image, (John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2011), 106

 6. Pullman, Philip, The Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Modernism and Storytelling in Daemon Voices, (David Fickling Books, Oxford, 2017), 202