Big thanks to Elaine Wilson and Arthouse1 in London for allowing us to house their gorgeous catalog in Cfile’s online archive of ceramics books and catalogs. Click here to view Corps a Corps for FREE in cfile.library.
Corps a Corps | Elaine Wilson
Shapiro, Abi
London: Arthouse1, 2018
23 Pages
“When Elaine told me the starting point for her new series was a media story about a violent attack on a women, and a court judge’s remark that a “women should take responsibilities for their own safety”, I thought about the myriad ways throughout history that women have had to account for their bodily safety in public and private spaces. Bourgeois’s hybrid Femme [Maison] reverses the typical safety of the hybrid domestic realm by making the female body porous with open orifices of windows and doorways vulnerable to transgression…. It is within this territory of gender, bodies, violence and safety that Elaine Wilson continues to work. Like Bourgeois’s half-century fixation on Femme Maison, Elaine’s practice has an ongoing concern with representations of femininity and its relationship to power through vision.” -Abi Shapiro
Scottish-born ceramic artist Elaine Wilson constructed a series of watchtower structures (i.e. Sentinel, Bunker, Pontiff…) for her show at Arthouse1 in London. Wilson’s series comments on power, vision, and control absorbed by the supposedly constant and omniscient patriarchal gaze. But one might query, who lives in these watchtowers?
“It is women themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own bodies…. The women who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day, or who feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become just as surely as the inmate in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to relentless self surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy.” -Sandra Bartky
Wilson holds her MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art and her BFA from the Washington University in St. Louis School of Art. Her work is in the collections of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Library of Congress, The University of Michigan Office of the President, Washington DC Artist Bank, Herman Miller, and Cigna Corp. among other public and corporate collections. Her work is in numerous private collections across the country. She has exhibited widely with nineteen solo shows, four two person shows and has been included in over thirty group exhibitions around the country. Among grants and residencies she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Artists Fellowship, a DC Commission on Arts and Humanities Grant and a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT. Wilson has over thirty years of teaching experience at the college level and at community art centers, including Rhode Island School of Design, University of Michigan School of Art and Design, Washtenaw Community College, and Wesleyan University. She has taught numerous art workshops to introduce artists and non-artists to the exploration of the behavior of Color. She lives and works in Washington, DC. (Bio taken from artist’s website)
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