What Can’t Be Seen: An Interview With Alison Wilding
Grace Ayre, The Quietus
August 2018
What kind of a sculptor, commissioned to make a new piece for a major show, would produce a low-lying work to be positioned half-hidden in a flowerbed, encroached on by grasses? Who would trouble to embellish the interiors of sculptures with precious metals quite invisible to the viewer, or elsewhere with elements that can only be seen, faintly, from certain angles, and who resists any kind of explanatory wall texts? And yet whose art invades one’s views and speaks through a multitude of materials and allusions?
Alison Wilding’s works in Right Here & Out There, on view at the De La War Pavilion in Bexhill until 16 September, are understated and alchemical in equal measure. Sculptures such as Red Skies(1992), Drowned and Dark Horse (both 1993) combine gilded and patinated metals with Perspex acrylics, fossil-rich stone with neoprene; ancient substances contacted and cloaked by contemporary synthetics, the precious and utilitarian exchanging secrets. Titles are personal, poetic and full of menace — Locust (1983), Foreign Body (1997), Cuckoo (2015) and Riptide (2018) — suggestive of enormous capacity for destruction lurking in the small and unseen. “I’m quite attracted to beautiful, deadly things’, Wilding has noted in the past. […]