Kate Wilson

Compressed

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Oil
Panel
60 x 150 cm

£2,950

“I, like so many of us, am deeply concerned about the impact our throwaway society is having on the environment. I regularly notice and engage with rubbish thrown on the street. I pick up coffee lids, juice and water bottle tops, paper bags, and plastic containers and take them back to my studio to draw. Norman Bryson’s book, Looking at the Overlooked (1990), describes how still life painting by the 17th century Spanish painters Zurbaran and Catan, gave worth to the ordinary and disregarded. These were paintings of humble and overlooked things. Can rubbish be given similar care and attention? Can things abandoned as worthless be given a new life as paintings? Compressed is based on photos of a container I saw thrown down over growing grass. This had forced the green shoots to push through cracks in the plastic. It caused me to think about the visual contrast between the living and the inert – between the vibrant green and the translucent, damaged surface overlaying it. Here is a kind of redemption.”