Alison Wilding’s Beautiful, Deadly Things
Ella Nixon, ArtReview
November 2024
Beautiful, deadly things inspire Alison Wilding. Some of her art objects lean towards ethereality. A delicate, orb-like Gobstopper 5 (2020) made of silver-gold wire, floats, suspended from the ceiling on a transparent thread. Others are earthbound. Hocus Pocus (2022) features a rusty orb atop a serrated disc-like form fixed to the wall. Dirty, dark, dangerous. If the first orb is beauty, the second is death. This relationship between other-worldly and earthbound objects, between symbolism and materiality, is one of the structuring principles in this retrospective show of the British artist.