Plinth

These are lines from Alison Wilding’s Without casting light on the subject (1975). They sit below a black-and-white photograph of the arrangement described. The specificity of the inches and feet and the ‘light proof muzzle’ is satisfying, the textures are balanced – ‘watery emulsion’ next to the solid ‘slate’ – and yet, in a way that feels novel, the sentences refuse to signpost, to take you anywhere conclusive, or indeed cast any light on the subject, just as the title promised. Rather, the subject is the subject. Here, as in the work Wilding has produced in the 50 years since, everything is what it is, and yet — and yet. Faced with sculptures that are just as poised yet un-signposted, literal and figurative, as the sentences above, the viewer is left holding these contradictions, inventing statements of her own. 'That’s what I like, in fact. Ambiguities can be an interesting place,' the artist says. A light is cast after all — even if it flickers.

‘There aren't any rules about anything,’ Wilding says of her wide-ranging practice. She freely combines many different materials, makes works on a range of scales; mostly an abstract sculptor, ‘I allow myself to move out of abstraction into something much more figurative’, as each work requires. As such, the viewer is permitted multiple responses, too, encouraged to make it up as she goes along. ‘Testing the Objects of Affection’ – the title of a new exhibition at Alison Jacques – is an apt way of characterising this series of encounters; experiments, involving both the head and the heart.

The sense of humour in her work is something Wilding downplays, but it’s present. Included here is one from a series of smaller works made from alabaster — 'They came very quickly. And the titles—at that point, I didn’t really care much about titles.' Still, Ahem (2020) is a witty name for an artwork – objects we often suspect are just about to tell us something, if we wait around long enough. Pointed high-density foam lends the sculpture a vaguely cruciform shape — it sits flush to the wall the way a crucifix might — while on top is a sphere, recalling the disembodied circle-for-a-head of fire exit or toilet door signage. Hard meets soft, and reverence meets irreverence. Ahem, throat cleared, you might as well trace the pink and brown veins in the alabaster while you wait for a pronouncement; they are signs in and of themselves, iron oxide clouding in the stone.

The art critic John Russell once wrote, ‘Backs can be turned to a bad painting; a bad sculpture sits there and defies us to ignore it.’ Perhaps a good sculpture, then, is one you can’t turn your back on: Wilding’s Drowned (2003) rushes up on you like a wave. At two metres tall, neither totem nor tipi, the truncated cone form more than holds its own in the gallery’s double-height back room. In a deep phthalo green, the translucent acrylic mediates some of its monumentality – that is, the material is literally lighter, and allows light through, compared to the heaviness of, say, bronze, a material we are far more used to encountering in sculptures of this scale. Mimicking the murk, depth and weightlessness of water, Drowned threatens to engulf the viewer. At the same time, it is clean and contained as a glass bottle. Defiant; unignorable.

'I always need a visceral kick from something that I’ve done,' Wilding says. 'Until I get that, it’s not done.' Throughout her career, Wilding has resisted the pressure to reproduce past successes. 'These days, I actually work really slowly,’ she adds. ‘It’s quite hard to make something that is completely new.' She recalls a tutor from her student days who would always talk about 'making little winners' — small, saleable pieces designed to appeal to the market. This idea, she laughs, ‘utterly revolted’ her. ‘I'm not thinking how anybody is going to approach or encounter or puzzle about anything,’ she says, ‘because as long as I get it, that's all that matters.’

Indeed, in the grand scheme of things, why else would one bother? ‘When I left the Royal College, the idea of being able to make a living as an artist was just absolutely ludicrous.’ Wilding’s early years were marked by resourcefulness, creating sculptures from ‘bits of wood and wire, anything around’ — an approach born of necessity but still an essential part of her process, or at least a way of looking. In her studio is a section of drainpipe that was lying around at home until she salvaged it during building works, ‘because I suddenly thought, this is quite interesting. It's a drainpipe, but if you turn it over, it's something else.’

In fact, Wilding’s range of fabrication techniques is expansive enough to make you think all the world’s a studio. Contrasting with the solid, no-nonsense acrylic of Drowned are more precarious seeming blocks of Crystacal sitting on tarnished bronze wall plinths. Terrestrial (2003) is a pair of pyramidal, lozenge or stealth bomber shapes, made from slotted pieces of acrylic, which – as their title suggests – sit close to the ground. 'It was a counterpoint to Migrant,' Wilding says – a similarly lozenge-shaped sister work installed in a reedbed in Snape Maltings in Sussex. Terrestrial’s colour palette was chosen to mimic the purple and brown hues of the reedbed in bloom. Migrant is raised on a keel, but when the reeds grow the lozenges appear to skim along the surface like boats. 'They’re angled towards the river, so they’re going – they’re not coming. They’re sort of on the move, rather than being stable.'

Of course, the tension between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the foreign, plays a significant role in Wilding’s practice; at the same time, such a general sweeping statement falls well short of far more productive ambiguities. As in life, Wilding’s work reminds us, the subject rarely reveals itself all at once. Rather, we sense in our gut that visceral kick or that feeling of affection, as we stay on the move. Nothing for it, but to keep on testing.

By Sammi Gale

Cover image: Alison Wilding. Photo: Tomos Davies

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