V Biennale Internazionale Donna

V Biennale Internazionale Donna. Curated by Riccardo Rizzetto. 27 March – 3 May 2026. Magazzino 26, Trieste.

We live in a time that constantly demands to be named. In an era of clusterisation, where it becomes more important for an algorithm to recognise what is being discussed than to attempt to understand the present, every transformation seems to require a word to contain it, every crisis a term to render it intelligible. When categories begin to waver, the temptation is to rigidify them: to ask words to impose order, to hold together what no longer stays still, and to restore an appearance of calm. Rather than questioning the systems of thought adopted so far and imagining new ones, there is an insistence on naming, classifying, and further categorising.

Wilson's work titled, ‘Thin Places’, refers to sacred places, rooted in Irish and Scottish tradition, where the veil between the physical world and the spiritual realm, thins. This allows for communication and closeness between the divine and the earthly. The work depicts a butterfly, who has undergone metamorphosis, ‘dying’ and coming back to life in the body of another creature. This transition most likely means, she has passed to the other side and back again, experiencing both realms, in quick succession. Now returned to the natural world she gazes upwards, watching the veil close.

Her painting, ‘Amplification’, is filled with symbols, 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.

Wilson’s paintings are highly textured, before painting, she begins with collage building up layers of texture such as cut out pieces of canvas, cargo nets, parachutes, string. Then working with painting and oil bar she employs a unique variation on the technique of frottage. Rubbing over these surfaces, the rubbings remain on the paintings surface, revealing the sediment of forms and materials that has created these gnarly surfaces.

As many as twenty layers of colour are built up in a very shallow pictorial space, resulting in paintings that vibrate, like the subject matter of unseen forces they depict.

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