Portals I: Choreography for Breath in the 6th Dimension (2024)
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Preferring analogue with minimal digital methodologies Teleportals I is my first experimentation with the device of Pepper’s Ghost (invented by J.H. Pepper, 1891), a stage trick and method of light diffraction that creates the illusion of a floating spectre. I situate three dancing versions of herself into glass domes, synchronously appearing, disappearing and exchanging domes. The installation explores themes of material belonging as presence, absence and in- betweenness, proposing the breath as possibly the only tangible continuum. Though the artwork is intentionally playful, the sci-fi aesthetic and accompanying text also prompts conversations around just what would global powers, including the growing body of tech- billionaire space-mercenaries, do with such teleportation technologies.
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Interior Lights (2023)
Exploration of light boxes in preparation for a drawing performance. This project has influenced all of my subsequent investigations into visualising hypnagogia, phosphenes and portals.
Hypnagogia (Light Cones) 2023
Hypnogogia (2023) Photoshop of conceptual installation (multiple actual sculptures)
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Hypnagogia introduces my life long explorations into sleep, dreaming, and the in between states of hypnagogia and hypnopompia. This research borrows and aligns the concept of Lyotard’s libidinal band with breath directed bipedal uprightness and aspects of cosmic breath-directed spiral verticality in disk galaxies (Ghosh et al 2022a). In contrast to bipedal uprightness the research also links my Breath Induced Vivid Dreaming [BIVD] (Wilson: 2005, 2016) method that posits dreaming, hypnagogia, hypnopompic visualization as horizontal circadian paradigms. Drawing upon recently published research that makes such contemporary speculations possible and correlations in ancient Eastern metaphysics, in particular early Buddhist teachings (EBT) on impermanence and the inter- spiritual concept of kundalini spiral energy1 and Zen this research approaches existence and being as continuously cosmologically emergent. |
Sleepwalkers (2024)
Sleepwalkers I: 03:44 am. muslin, steel and copper wire, rust, housepaint, plaster-paint, cotton thread, LED light, cable.
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Sleepwalkers II: 04:33 am. muslin, wire, housepaint, horsehair, rust, waxed thread, LED light, cable.
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Sleepwalkers I & II synthesise my odyssey through hypnogogic visualisation and lucid dreamwork in the small hours of the night, saved by my childhood conditioning of not being allowed to make any noise at night. In fear of waking my father, a dairy man who had to rise at 3.30 am every day of the year bar Christmas Day, I never yielded to my eating disorder once in bed. Night, sleep, and horizontality became the only refuge in a virtual gymnasium of freedom from suffering, a practice that evolved into my creative methodology across all areas of my practice and life. Sleepwalkers I&II introduce the floating timeless emergent imagery, sometimes figurative, sometimes textural, always luminous. This aspect of my practice is about generating agency in sleep and dreaming, using the virtual space as a portal to inhabit and evolve, birthing new positive soma (body) neuro (brain/nervous system) holding patterns. Breath Quartet advances these themes extensively through performance. |
Research paper is available on Academia.edu: |
Third Eye Happenings and other Hypnagogia (2024)
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Third Eye Happenings and other Hypnagogia or Midnight Show at the Prisoner’s Cinema (2024) is a triptych oil painting on wood that expresses the phenomenon of internal light called ‘phenomes’. These floating inner illuminations may appear as dot-like, abstract shapes, clouds, figures, shadow warps coming and going, and even a cinematic screen experience perceived in the region of the third eye (this is an imaginary plane extending from the middle of the forehead and forwards into space around 12-20 cm).
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Phenome based light shows are reported by meditators during intense meditation experiences, by workers such as drivers operating at night, astronauts, and prisoners incarcerated in low light and dark cells, hence the term Prisoner’s Cinema phenomenon. Using oils, wax and kinetic hand painting Wilson orchestrates multiple layers of non-black colours to create a chroma-portal activated by minimal light levels spot lit using a hand-made paper snoot over an iPhone torch. This installation is activated by moving surface light. |
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Crossing: Death the Horizontal (2024)
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Crossing: Death the Horizontal (2024) Video installation, metal, AV display, video 00:03:00 looping
Crossing: Death the Horizontal is another playful video installation that invites contemplation of where our breath goes after death. The project speculates breath as circulating continuously in an ever-moving cosmos, asking, do we inhale our ancestors and the long dead kin and foe, might we each inhale protean stardust and life-breath of other planets? I conjecture so and visualise this narrative through the lens of mortality and telemorphosis into and through other dimensions. The image of Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642), a painting celebrated as possessing astounding qualities and manipulation of light in dark, is my third visitation of the subject of luminance and phosphenes as the artist’s internal gaze.
Breath Cypher Portals (2024)
Cypher #01 (2024): wood, house paint, casein marble paint, lead pencil, gouache, ink, 168 cm x 3663 cm x 6 cm
Cypher #01 detail
Breath Cypher Portals is my latest project and development of my bi-handed drawing practice. Inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics, Strunk's 'Elements of Style (1920), and Hellenist astrological glyphs, this large wall mural was created as a durational happening (Kaprow) drawing each figure from left to right across the entire surface. Akin to automatic writing and psychography (Georgie Hyde-Lees, Arthur Conan Doyle) and Andre Breton's automatism, Cypher #01 both follows and directs the flow of breath generating a topography of movement that prompts the brain to 'see patterns' 'text' 'symbols' 'dance choreographies' 'pilgrimages' 'instructions' 'code' 'maps' and 'breath circulation'. This is the first of a body of experimenting with surfaces, scale, site specific installation and a deep dive into the emerging imagery that rise in these automatic drawing states. Using both hands simultaneously to render the figures expands and stabilises the fluid laying down process.
Why did language and symbols develop? During the drawing process I was acutely aware of shapes and lines that reminded of many of the ancient languages. I was struck by the feeling of the entirety of human consciousness bustling to communicate as one. Towards the end of the process a powerful sense of 'change' rose in me, and a personal realisation about the relationship between 'repetition' and 'change'. How and why repetition moves beyond repeating to something quite new. I guess this is why Breton and Yeats and all the mystics before them steeped themselves in rituals of motion.
Why did language and symbols develop? During the drawing process I was acutely aware of shapes and lines that reminded of many of the ancient languages. I was struck by the feeling of the entirety of human consciousness bustling to communicate as one. Towards the end of the process a powerful sense of 'change' rose in me, and a personal realisation about the relationship between 'repetition' and 'change'. How and why repetition moves beyond repeating to something quite new. I guess this is why Breton and Yeats and all the mystics before them steeped themselves in rituals of motion.
Poetics of Failure I (2023)
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Poetics of Failure I as a project scrutinises the co-dependence of oil and war and the current wave of tech-billionaires obsession with colonising Space, proposing an intergenerational unchanging behaviour pattern in world leadership as gargantuan hereditary stubbornness. This series of installations draws attention to the direct link between the rise of the industrial revolution, mass consumerism that is historically deemed as the ‘golden age of oil’, the dependence upon oil for infantry warfare and the catastrophic casualties arising from poor fuel logistics, the interdependency of the financial markets on every aspect of oil excavation, storage, and distribution, and last but not least the locked in global dependency on oil as the major obstacle to an earnest transition to green and renewable fuels.
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HAP: 'To cover, surround, enfold, so as to shelter, shield or conceal anything' (Scottish Slang, 1690)
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Growing up my experience of canvas as a material was that of a water resistant cover (or 'hap' as it was termed) to keep rain and sleet from ruining bales of hay and horse feed, sometimes saddles and soap too. It wasn't until the age of 18 I saw my first oil painting hanging in a gallery, an unplanned drop into the National Gallery while waiting for an interview that I'd travelled from Glasgow to London on the bus to have. I didn't get the job, which was a sales assistant in a Saville Row shop due to open and offer luxury horse riding attire made of beautiful tweeds and cavalry twill. Instead I was offered the opportunity of a life time, to feature in an editorial piece in Vogue Magazine. The piece was about 'country bumpkin makes girl about town'. The task was to take on two or three part-time jobs, work out like crazy, learn to walk and dance, fix my hair and accent, and leave my entire wardrobe behind. Yes I said. Following a 12-hour bus trip home I told my mother of my life changing situation - the one and only time she aired an opinion and took command, forbidding me to allow anyone to tell me how I should look. That was that and I returned to working with horses, drawing strange figures on haps, day dreaming about the National Gallery... little did I know then the path I was to take, returning 40-years later to the same materials and wishful hopes.
What interests me is visually articulating the worlds that reside in me and cavalcade in my dreams. After years of oil painting on stretched canvas wondering why the outcome was raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly, I concluded it might be time to give up painting. I'm better with clay after all. Something in me fell apart on the canvas, revealing and concealing myself at once. Over fifty of my old painted stretched canvases painted in the 1990's and early 2000s live in storage. For years I've contemplated busting them up, rupturing and tearing them apart only to stitch them together in a Frankenstein sculpture. Finally I bought some raw canvas and started throwing paint at it, revelling in the dripping that Pollock must have experienced. It is addictive. Before painting I soaked the clean canvas in the canal hoping for some stains, hoping to invite Nature to meet me half way. Next, instead of using oil paint I used up old Farrow & Ball house paint tins stored in the shed. The effect is halfway between a 'surface skin' and 'dye'. As soon as the soaking pigment dried, settling organically into cloud features directed by falling rain and evaporating dew of dawn, I knew I'd found my medium. This is what I'd been looking for, not aspiring to a pristine perfect aesthetic but re-connecting with my own Scottish Celtic agricultural heritage and falling in love with the raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly. Next came the wire, not the rusty lethal Tetanus causing barbed-wire of my childhood, but sinew-like red iron dusted wire used to stabilise posts and nails. It is not the woman in me who creates, but the wandering child determined to bring muck and haps to life. |
Colonial Drift installation, London (2022)
Colonial Drift installation, London 2022, Video. Duration: 01:15
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Situated as a discourse in the liminality of human agency this enquiry examines ontological absolutism as the cubic space of breath. In Liminal Agency I compress my ageing body inside a 120 cm? lightbox and use breath-directed spontaneous postures to explore the contact points of capitalist ontology as unitary commodification. Agency here is confined by universal dualistic systems.
in Colonial Drift I use astrology and food mould to visualise the future-state climate crisis: extinction is a human choice. Using the astrological chart of the Conference Of the Parties (COP) 2030 1.5° Charter I illustrate the contradiction of global economic growth and climate crisis management as a live expanded drawing performance inside the cuboid lightbox. This is intended to be performed live as a protest against dualist socio-politic- economic finitudes. Mould Cartography is a wall mounted plaque to be enlarged to 400 × 250 x 20 cm. Rotting mouldy food set in plaster cubes are arranged as a map of the United States of America, still the largest consumer nation on the planet. |