In all times, in all places, somehow…

Solo show, Sarah Kate Wilson
Gallery 36, Newcastle.
‘In all times, in all places, somehow…’ 2025
12th – 20th July 2025

Wilson’s paintings conjure a world just beyond language—a realm shaped by natural phenomena, ancestral memory, visitations, cosmic rhythm, ancient ritual, community, and magic. She fills her canvases with motifs—spirals, open hands, planets, mountains, nets, scored lines, constellations. These are not decorative emblems, but living signs drawn, perhaps, from what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious: the shared psychic inheritance of humankind, populated by archetypes that emerge across time, place and cultures without ever having been taught.

Employing a high-octane palette of acrylic and oil her paintings are created through a labour-intensive process of collage, painting, and a unique variation on frottage. Collaging together shapes cut from canvas alongside found materials; parachutes, cargo nets, string, clothing, and ‘studio debris’ she creates densely textured surfaces, that once painted are rubbed over with oil bar. Rather than lifting an impression, her rubbings remain on the paintings surface, revealing the sediment of forms and materials that has created these gnarly surfaces. Layer upon layer of colour is built up resulting in surfaces that fizz.

These scintillating head-sized paintings are installed here, on gallery walls cloaked in large black-and-white fabrics, draped, like theatre backdrops. These backcloths are also created using frottage, capturing the textures of leaves, threads, flowers, and tree bark. In making them, Wilson was reminded of her childhood: taking rubbings of Neolithic cup-and-ring marks carved into rocks on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire. She says “It felt like my hands were touching the hands of my ancestors, communicating with them, directly.”

In Wilson’s world, time is porous, symbols and knowledge move through us, whilst our hands reach backwards and forwards. The exhibition’s title, ‘In all times, in all places, somehow…’, gestures toward this sense of temporal collapse—a recognition that the past is not behind us, but beside us.

• https://36limestreet.co.uk/exhibition/in...