PATRICIA WILSON-ADAMS: stain me with the intensity of black

Free exhibition

Patricia Wilson-Adams has been a printmaker for most of her creative life and states - 'you might say it is engraved into the very way I live. I have spent a lifetime with black stains under my fingernails'.  

This survey exhibition comprises traditional etchings and engravings as well as a wide range of works including installations and major sculptural works which are to be shown for the first time. 

Wilson-Adams’ work is framed around the healing theories of Ecophenomenology - a re-conceptualisation of human relationships with the natural earth.^[1] The work focuses essentially on issues concerning the environment, cultural landscapes, land usage and the place of the individual within these spaces.  Here she explores notions of what it is like 'to be in and of the world'.  One of the most pervasive themes of the exhibition is around the sense of loss – the loss of land, the loss of those who have gone before and the loss of environment.

Wilson-Adams describes herself as not being a “signature” artist, but rather one for whom the project dictates the form, medium and materials. Her approach can be described as being polyvalent, with an aesthetic that has been referred to as being 'rustic and flinty' with 'an arte-povera sensibility'.^[2] 

As an academic at the University of Newcastle for three decades, Wilson-Adams has a deep engagement with the world of ideas and enjoys research and writing and has always maintained that to be 'intellectually alive' is important.  Fundamental to her work is a diverse range of references and influences from literature and poetry, from Lucy Lippard who coined the phrase 'eccentric abstraction', to the Japanese Gutai movement which reveled in the adventurous and unexpected.  Wilson-Adams also acknowledges a debt to Minimalism, and more recently she has become interested in the tensions (as present in Japanese art) between the restraints of Minimalism as opposed to the outright chaotic.

'I like to think that I am using materiality, image, text and form to open up spaces to the phenomenological and to meaning'.

Related Documents:
PATRICIA WILSON-ADAMS: stain me with the intensity of black catalogue (pdf)