Margot Wilson

About

Margot Wilson is a Scottish born artist working through streaming consciousness and ritual based methodologies, fluxing between abstraction and figuration. Wilson’s interdisciplinary practice is rooted in rhythmic and arrhythmic use of her hands and breath to explore the thresholds of belonging as the stable/unstable in material emergence in movement, sculpture, and text.

A self-taught artist and astrologer for over 35-years Wilson returned to education in her 40s to formally study philosophy, writing and art to bring together her life-long obsession with paradoxical freedom in predictive systems such as astrology, tarot, automatic writing and improvisational art making. The deeper Wilson dug into Western philosophy the greater the tensions she felt in her own life, with one foot in archaic divination and the other in analytical rationalism and technology. Performing and creating with music, Wilson uses Tantric and contemporary sound to drive the engine of her durational performances in modelling, drawing, typing and breath-based sounds. Influenced by Duchamp, Cage, Kerouac and Aft Klimt, she fervently avoids repetition and works subliminally with no aesthetic end vision in mind, often not looking at what she is making. Wilson’s aim is to give agency to the artwork through making rituals that initiate their belonging in the world accepting that the outcomes do not always land. She never destroys any work.

With careers in technology behind her and concerns regarding the meteoric rise of A.I., Wilson is also motivated to situate breath, dreaming, channelling and improvisation as somatic technologies on an equal if not greater footing than any artificial intelligence. This journey involves a diverse range of themes including Palaeolithic Venus, quantum emergence physics, space colonisation and the exhilarating view of the cosmos and consciousness as an orchestral phenomena. Wilson’s turns to ancient non-binary pre-patriarchal and futurist worlds to express these themes.

Wilson’s current portfolio includes the clay modelling of over 2,000 Venus maquettes to research the material’s inherent anthropomorphicity, continuous typing and engraving projects as fluid acts of analytical streaming consciousness, sculpture making as volumes of breath, and sound and movement collaboration with Patrick Ziza, Marcus Herne, and James Merrell as Breath Quartet. These making projects are moving navigations of the stable/unstable forces of being human and the cosmos.

Wilson has degrees in Philosophy (BA, Birkbeck & MPhil, Glasgow), MA Writing  (RCA) Fine Art-Graduate Diploma (RCA) and MA Contemporary Art Practice (RCA). Her worked has exhibited in group shows including Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition (2023), Tate Modern (Tate Lates) (2024), Visual Arts Scotland (2024), Cookhouse Gallery (2024) and Copeland Gallery (2024).