David Wilson

David Wilson arrived in Australia in 1965 having studied painting at the Harrow School of Art in England. He completed his Associate Diploma in Sculpture from the National Gallery School, in Melbourne in 1970. Much of his earlier sculptural works were very much within the welded steel tradition often associated with the work of Anthony Caro. From the 1980s onwards, texture and later paint became key elements in his work. With a painter’s eye, he uses colour for constructing space and volume. In a series of questions to David Wilson about his use and obvious painter’s knowledge of colour on cast metal sculpture, his responses were candid and articulate, and they appear below. As a sculptor of the experience of being in the landscape, he is unique in Australia.

“In the late 1980s, I became increasingly interested in texture in my forges and welded steel work and early in the1990s, I began experimenting with small cast sculptures to try to enlarge the range of textures I could achieve. At the same time, it seemed that a re-introduction of colour could be a desirable complement to the texture and so I started painting the casts. Colour, painterly colour, continued to interest me but given the type of painting affect I wanted, I was unable to find the means of applying this to the steel works and so casting in aluminium and bronze superseded my previously favoured material and methods. Much of the inspiration for both forms and colours comes from observations of landscape and skyscape, particularly the skies which I often photograph as a source material. The look of the sky seems to be one of our few remaining daily surroundings unblemished by human interference - it is distant, uncompromised, both innocent and indifferent – and it is these aspects of its character which make it so suitable a source for an artist who has become somewhat contemptuous of our culture’s preoccupation with itself. A kind of incest where humanity and its delusions are treated as the measure of all things. The look of the sky, shapes and colours, seems untouched and invulnerable to our conceits. I want my sculptures’ physical presence and painterly textured surfaces to seem to share that cited innocence and indifference, to be unequivocally ‘there’ and ‘here’, but apart, never really known except in the experiencing of them, alluding to things natural, without ever being able to be placed.”

Wilson’s sculptures hovers between sculpture and painting. There is a paradoxical quality in his use of colour and the way it affects the scale of his cast sculptures. The scale is both intimate and vast. Long time Twilight, his work in the 2005 McClelland Contemporary Sculpture Survey and Award, is powerfully resonant of the Australian bush: acacia seed pods, Kino resin, peeling swathes of bark; fire and rebirth. Other smaller works such as those made for Defiance Gallery’s annual miniature sculpture exhibition, allude to remnants of human labour like rusted farm implements. They are coated with thick paint the colour and texture of the reclaiming sticky ochre clay at the bottom of a dry dam. Works such as Cloud Cast evoke the luscious opacity of building cumulus cloud formations, tinged with late afternoon light; indifferent to human concerns. David Wilson’s sculptures are evocations of the particular experience being in, within, the landscape. He has taken on that nexus in Australian culture, landscape, and made his own unique contribution.

Anne Saunders