Artist Bio and Statement
Joanna Baxter Wilson
Graduated Glasgow School of Art (2012), currently enrolled in the MFA at the Edinburgh College of
Art. Recent shows have been held at the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and the Talbot Rice Gallery
and Embassy Gallery, both in Edinburgh.
As an artist working in video and environmental art/sculpture, I find it much easier to express myself
using a visual language – It is often the only way I can fully express my thoughts and ideas. I work
with mundane materials often with abject qualities (Kristeva writes, “It is … not lack of cleanliness or
health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules”). I increasingly think of time as one of my materials as well as subjects. A
completed art work offers a tangible object in which time – my time building and thinking and an
audience’s time watching and interacting – is contained and represented.
“All arts address the same imponderable forces although each addresses them
specifically through its own techniques. Deleuze suggests that perhaps at the bottom of
all arts is the attempt to make time comprehensible, time touchable, all of the arts are
about capturing the invisible, unheard, tasteless, soundless form of time.”
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi & Milla Tiainen, (2007) ‘Feminism, Art, Deleuze and Darwin: An
Interview with Elizabeth Grosz’ in Nora, Nordic Journal of Woman’s Studies, pp246-256
Waiting, the focus of this workshop, resonates with my interest in allowing things to develop of their
own accord over time. While waiting can feel instrumental, as an anticipation of something else
happening next where enduring the passage of time is prerequisite, I see it also and simultaneously
as part of the moment we are waiting for. My work is informed by Deleuze’s idea of ‘becoming’, a
notion that builds fluidity even into still objects and isolated events. The video work I do, and display
here, has a sculptural aspect in that it not only presents activity from another time and space but
also is situated in this time and space, forming intermedial connections between the materials from
which it was constructed, multiple spaces (there and here) and time (then, now and between).
“Moments are those instants that we would each, according to our own personal
criteria, categorise as ‘authentic’ moments that break through the dulling monotony of
the ‘taken for granted’ […] Moments are those times when one recognises or has a
sudden insight or inspiration beyond the merely empirical routine of some activity. A
moment is a flash of the wider significance of some ‘thing’ or event – its relation to the
whole, and by extension, our relation to totality.”
Rob Shields, ‘Lefebvre, Love & Struggle,’ Spatial Dialectics, p58
Sad Cow, 2013 (video/sculpture: cling film, rainbow drops, time)
Jelly, 2014 (video/sculpture: jelly, clouds)