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Personal statement

Through painting Camilla Wilson explores the image as a condensed, inhabited form of experience. The direct encounter of place, its recall and reconstruction lie at the heart of her practice.

Walking provides source material for her paintings, in which urban, peri-urban and semi-rural landscapes exist between an uncertain past and a speculative future. The paintings seek to reconcile overlooked forms of life with the conflicting traces of use, former and current habitation.

Sometimes the paintings seek to represent the desire to find a lost place and negotiate a language appropriate to the sense of recognition and return. The emphasis is upon the sense of inhabiting; inhabiting the space, and the image as a space. Some show forms of ruin, places in transition, open to an ambiguity of reading and spatial experience, between a lost purpose, present ambivalence and potential future.

These paintings are in a sense fragments. Just as ruins do, they refer to a lost whole. The painted language here seeks to elaborate the incomplete as complete. In these paintings, the places might appear unbound by function, de-familiarised, and free to take on a dreamlike quality. Intimacy and estrangement are elaborated through spatial and colour interference. Delaying recognition, eliding boundaries of real and unreal, the work suggests that inhabiting an architectural space is more a psychological than physiological state.

Camilla has been a Jerwood Contemporary Painters finalist and has shown her work solo in London at Fordham, Laurent Delaye, as well as in group shows at the Herbert Read gallery, Metropole Galleries, ArtSway, Salford, Dunkirk and Cardiff amongst others; and outside the UK in Cologne, Vienna, Maribor and Berlin. She has also curated exhibitions, amongst which were "Of and For" at the Bank, and "Mirei" in Unit 2, Whitechapel, with the artist Mary Maclean. Aside from lecuring at Bath School of Art and Design, Camilla has taught at Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Goldsmiths College, Kent Institute of Art and Design, and Holbaek Kunsthøjskolen in Denmark. 

Academic qualifications

• MFA Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, 1999
• BA Fine Art (first class honours), Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, 1997
• BA French/Italian (first class honours) QMW, London University, 1990.

Professional memberships

• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

ºÚÁÏÕýÄÜÁ¿ employment

• 2008-present.

Other external roles

• Lecturer at The Cass, London Metropolitan University.

Area of expertise

• Painting.

Other research outputs

Reviews/exhibition catalogue entries:

• Jerwood Contemporary Painters (catalogue), 2007
• Zoo Art Fair (catalogue), 2005
• Mark Gisbourne, "The Contemporaries’ Contemporaries", Contemporary Visual Art, Issue 17.

Awards:

• 2003 Studio residency, Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany
• 2000 Awarded an ACAVA studio for one year.

Collections:

• Paintings in private collections in London, New York and Tokyo.