"Suddenly, on walks around London, I noticed that these poisonous plants were growing everywhere. Near my studio, I saw thorn apple, which is one of the most poisonous plants that grows wild in the U.K. Its sap is really poisonous. The plant was taller than me with these amazing, architectural, spiky seed pods. It looked so monstrous and intriguing, but I'd never noticed it until having done this reading."
"Her paintings are often populated by mythical beings, neither human nor animal, woman nor man, whose forms seem to grow out of the landscape itself. These paintings, which explore the myths and histories of the English countryside, specifically, upend the tidiness of landscape painting, which Wilson sees as tied to the history of land ownership and the fetishizing of unpopulated terrain."
Georg Wilson researched poisonous flora through second-hand botanical books and then recognized noxious plants growing across London. Thorn apple by her studio exemplified the monstrous, architectural quality of such species and the danger of their sap. Wilson works from a converted Victorian church studio in North London and figures centrally in the para-pastoral movement, which recasts the countryside as a confrontational space against nostalgic myths. Her previous show, The Last Oozings, featured folkloric scenes and oak-inspired guardians populated by ambiguous, landscape-emerging beings. The new exhibition, Against Nature, focuses on poisonous plants and complicates the controlled image of the English countryside.
Read at Artnet News
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