Where the wild things are: The art of Kim Wilson
Kim Wilson is one half of Brisbane’s most intrepid artistic couple and her art explores wild places far from home and a few gum trees just down the road.
I was confused about the title of Brisbane artist Kim Wilson’s latest exhibition at Mitchell Fine Art in Fortitude Valley. It’s called Luxury – and when you hear that word you tend to think of high-end hotels or designer goods and apparel.
But Wilson is not talking about that sort of luxury. She makes clear her intentions in a helpful artist’s statement.
“Luxury can be frivolous, chocolate on a pillow, that kind of thing,” she writes. “That is the dictionary definition, but if it brings no pleasure and perhaps some guilt, can it really be luxury? Can’t luxury be having time, uninsulated, where the wilder things are; skin on the moss, light on trees, air moving, clean, toes in cool grass? I find it where I can and in the studio search for ways to portray the intangible somethings of the real, luxuriant life.
“These works are drawn from Fiordland New Zealand, and more urban places where those wild things still bring that sensation of luxury.”
There’s more, but you get the picture … or the painting.
And standing in front of her remarkable painting, Muse Escaping, I take her point about luxuriating in the natural world and, well, I do exactly that, letting myself mentally wander off into the verdant rainforest depicted. The location is Fiordland at the tip of New Zealand. Next stop Antarctica.
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Wilson visited here by boat with some friends and her husband, fellow painter Peter Anderson. I covered his last exhibition up the road at Philip Bacon Galleries and he had some works in that show from this trip too.
The couple visited Fiordland in 2022 and they have visited many remote places together over the years. They are quite an intrepid duo, although that description is perhaps an understatement.
They are incredible adventurers of the old school. Back at home in Brisbane they share a studio quite harmoniously (for the most part) and both produce the most incredible work from their adventures.
But as much as Wilson is inspired by remote wilderness places, she also finds her subject matter closer to home. In fact, next door but one where there are some towering gum trees that she features in a suite of 11 exquisite small canvasses exploring the beauty of these native Australian trees.
Beyond that she has travelled to those remote and diverse landscapes that she and Anderson explore in their work – northern Russia, the sub-Antarctic Islands Africa, the US, Canada and small island nations across the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. Their adventures blow me away. Then they both come home and paint.
Muse Escaping is probably the signature work of this show. It makes you want to just wander off into the dank lushness of a Fiordland forest. There are two figures visible in the background – her husband and the friend whose boat they travelled on.
Then there’s the muse – a shark. What is a shark doing floating through a rainforest? Good question. The artist did kind of explain it but I’m not sure I grasped it entirely. No matter, there it is, an intriguing addition that, strangely, doesn’t seem at all out of place.
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Gallery director Mike Mitchell has written a short essay about Wilson’s exhibition and he points out that her art “is an invitation to look closely, to appreciate nature’s beauty both large and small … to feel haunted by, and responsible for the damage we’ve done and to act”.
“She reminds us that caring for our planet is not optional, it is intrinsic to our survival,” writes Mitchell.
Wilson herself says that her art has a definite conservation message.
“The knowledge of what we are doing to the only planet we have hangs over me like a dark cloud,” she says. “I do not think we are a species apart from the natural world; we are part of it. We will inevitably change it, as all species do. I wish that we could use our big brains to manage what we change in a less crappy way than we are managing now.”
Fair enough.
Wilson’s paintings are elemental and rich in sometimes meticulous detail, all the way down to the ferns on the forest floor.
The Fiordland landscape was obviously inspirational and few venture to this land of inlets and islands at the bottom of New Zealand, a place once visited by James Cook on one of his voyages.
But Wilson and Anderson are intrepid and they go where we will probably never go. Then they come back and take us there through their art.
Kim Wilson: Luxury continues at Mitchell Fine Art, Fortitude Valley, until December 19.