Artists in conversation about Nightfall: new works from the dark
Michele Elliot sits down with fellow artist and friend Vyvian Wilson to talk about her new exhibition at Clifton School of Arts in November
Local artist, Vyvian Wilson’s exhibition NIGHTFALL will be showing at the Clifton School of Arts in November. Fellow artist and friend, Michele Elliot sat down with Vyvian to find out more about her exploration of the night.
Michele: Vyv, your art practice seems to be something of a meeting place between keen observations of your environment and gestural interpretations of colour, light and form. How does this play out in making a body of work such as Nightfall?
Vyvian: My work traverses abstraction and figuration, relying on the memory and feelings rather than literal realisations. Recently I have become keenly aware of how beautiful and mysterious the dark can be when a light source articulates shapes and colours that are perceived so differently in daylight.
Drawing is fundamental to my practice as are my daily walks along the coast, into the escarpment and national park and around the steelworks. I carry the images of the landscape within me, and it is only through making drawings and paintings that I can fully comprehend my relationship to it. This is what drives me to make my work.
Michele: Yes, I can see that relationship between moving around in the world and then taking your observations back to the studio. The work becomes distillations of time and place. What prompted you to focus on the night, on darkness?
Vyvian: When I was a child, my family often went on extended camping trips. What I loved the most about being out in the bush at nighttime was the light from hurricane lamps, campfires and torches that articulated beautiful shapes and textures that were unremarkable by day. I found comfort and happiness in the play of light in the stillness of the dark. I shared many nighttime walks with my father. It was a thrill to peer into the intimate, illuminated camp setups while myself being rendered invisible by the dark.
I also relished the night long car journeys between Melbourne and Sydney where I could observe the fleeting beauty of the impenetrable bush spotlit by the car’s headlights. Later as a young art student it was a revelation to discover this drama of light in dark captured in the chiaroscuro paintings of Goya, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and later in the paintings of Idris Murphy and photographs of Bill Henson. These earlier memories were reawakened when I first started walking close to the Port Kembla steelworks after dark.
Michele: I look at these new paintings and drawings and I’m transported to the park above Wombarra pool at night, fluorescent green, flickering moths, then the flash of a storm out at sea. In fact, just yesterday that massive storm left the sky and sea a velvety dark grey, ominous and beautiful. Nightfall is about darkness and at the same time, you have brought in light sources, both natural and artificial, to create powerful paintings and drawings of the night.
Vyvian: I’m exploring all light sources – artificial light, fire, lightning and moonlight on nighttime landscapes, the Illawarra escarpment, the sea, campsites, parklands, headlands. I want these works to speak to the way a light source and its shadows and reflections, which are mysterious and fluid, can reveal an unexpected beauty and poetry of these places.
I love the feeling of energy and drama when a storm is coming through, or a late evening walk after a torrential powerful downpour; that quality of dusk light, the atmosphere of an altered feeling in the air.
As distinct from sunlight, moonlight unifies the different components of the landscape. I’m also enthralled by the way artificial light cleaves the dark, how lightning, sudden and sublime, reveals what is usually hidden. For me urban parks lit at night, with their psychedelic green grass and long sinister shadows born of trees or an undecipherable source are both alluring and frightening.
Michele: While the exhibition conveys a strong sense of the landscape at night, there is also an emotional pull within the work. Is this something that you have considered?
Vyvian: Recently I have noticed that when working on a painting I become keenly aware of the darkness of the world – its sadness, cruelty and hopelessness. It can be overpowering. It’s only when I permit a light source, however tenuous or ambiguous, to enter the work that I start to relax and allow myself to feel the expectation that something beautiful and hopeful will be revealed.
Michele: Thank you for your thoughtful words, Vyv and congratulations on an evocative and poetic body of work.
NIGHTFALL – new works from the dark by Vyvian Wilson will open on Friday, 20 November, 6-8pm. The exhibition will be at Clifton School of Arts from 21-29 November, open from Wednesday-Sunday 10am-4pm.
About the writer
Michele Elliot is an artist, educator and occasional writer living and working on Wodi Wodi Country.
