Kate Wilson

Plastic

Jackson's Painting Prize 2022
Oil
Panel
21 x 16 cm

“My work deals with the relationship between the natural and the manmade – questioning what is beautiful and what is ugly. I live and work in South London and paint the familiar objects of my daily landscape.
I see bins like this one each time I travel on the tube or overground. In some ways I find them shocking. Their insides are exposed to view – like a person showing their guts. Plastic bags are generally thought to be an eyesore. Filled with rubbish they can be seen as signifier of our throwaway society. We need them to be there but they disturb the aesthetic of our space. So generally, we don’t like to see waste bins. But when I started drawing and painting individual plastic bags, I found that they – transformed through the act of intense looking – revealed themselves as strangely beautiful. This bin is painted in oil on a black ground. I like a smooth slippy primer I can drag and rub paint into. I find I can then exploit the way the ground shows through, modifying opaque overlays and transparent glazes to give a range of tones and colours.”