About Polly Jane Wilson

Polly Jane Wilson is a cross-disciplinary visual artist based in London. She graduated from BA Contemporary Textile Practices at Norwich University of the Arts in 2009, and will graduate from MA Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2021. Wilson’s work has been selected for shows across the UK, including at Saatchi Gallery, London, Bankside Gallery, London, R.K Burt Gallery & Safe House, London, and The Sainsbury Centre & Kings Lynn Arts Centre, Norfolk. 

Drawing from her personal experience of growing up on a commercial farm, Wilson’s work explores themes of belonging, human nourishment and ecological destruction. Seeking out the teetering points between the practical and romantic, she considers human attachment to the landscape, and its use as both an industrialised space for mass production and a seductive environment in which to escape. Materiality and surface are central to Wilson’s image-making. Her works are often realised as ephemeral installations combining unstable materials, painting techniques, sculptural forms and disorientating plays of light and shadow. She re-enchants commonplace substances such as sand, graphite and straw by using them in extreme and unexpected ways. In doing so, she evokes a sense of distorted reality and the supernatural to highlight the limits of human perception in experiencing earthly matter.