Alison Wilding is running late. Her cat brought a bird into the house this morning (“Dead or alive?” I ask, to which she responds, “Neither”) and she couldn’t face wringing its neck. She put it in a box and phoned a friend, and when they lifted the lid the bird flew away. As we settle into her studio – a mostly monochrome space in a railway arch in east London – I suggest it was a happy ending then, and she looks sceptical.
The 76-year-old British sculptor has a career-spanning exhibition opening at Alison Jacques gallery in London this week. It’s called Testing the Objects of Affection and over the rumble of trains she tells me it’s about her relationship with the works on display, which she shaped between 1975 and the present. “It’s a test every time you show things, every time you open yourself up to the public gaze, whatever that is.” Is it daunting? “I don’t give a shit,” she replies, with just a hint of a grin. “I say that, but I will. I think it’s going to be OK actually – well, I hope so – but anything can happen.”
Wilding is known for her abstract sculptures, which, like her, are at once playful and solemn, generous and discreet. With a wide range of raw materials, techniques and forms, she creates subtle and surprising constructions that reveal themselves only when you walk around them, stand on your tiptoes or stoop down; she lends equal weight to bits that are found and made, costly and cheap. She made a name for herself in the 1980s with so-called new British sculpture, a catch-all term for the creations of a group of young artists (among them Richard Deacon and Anish Kapoor) who were turning away from minimal and conceptual art towards a more traditional approach to making. She’s twice been shortlisted for the Turner prize, and she became a Royal Academician in 1999. In 2019 she was made an OBE.
And yet, she’s been somewhat overlooked, which may have something to do with the slippery meaning of her work, and her reluctance to talk about it. When I ask about the earliest pieces in the show (photographs of a couple of installations): “I was doing some fairly abstruse things at the time, and those two pieces are quite odd … that’s all I’m going to say about them.” As to whether she thinks about the viewer while manipulating her materials: “No, never. I make work for me, and … deal with it.” Blunt she may be, but Wilding is also deeply thoughtful, and as the half-dead bird demonstrates, she has a soft side. “There are some works that I’ve loved hugging because they just seem very huggable,” she confesses, her face creasing into a smile that swiftly vanishes as she adds, “but I don’t want anyone else to touch them.”
Did she always want to be an artist? “I don’t remember being interested in art, but I do remember being interested in objects,” she says of her childhood. Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, we grew up in St Ives, where she would take a table and turn it upside down to use as a boat, and climb inside a floor-length curtain and twist around until she’d formed a spiral. At school, she did a lot of drawing: “Introverted teenage-angst sort of stuff.” She went to art school because she wanted to be a beatnik. At Nottingham College of Art in 1966, she found herself surrounded by students who seemed to know everything. “I didn’t know anything, and I felt utterly at sea until I went into the plaster room. Things really started then.”
She began exhibiting after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1973, where she was the only woman in her year group, and one of three in the whole school. “It was a very misogynistic place, and actually in a way I just became one of the boys,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I was a feminist then because I don’t remember ever being angry about it. Although looking back I should have been.” Does she remember the point at which she started to … “Be a woman?” she interjects, deadpan. She was in a show called Eight Artists: Women at the Acme Gallery in 1978. “I’m not sure I would want to be in a show like that now, because like a lot of women artists I know, I think of myself as … an artist. What is it about a woman? I don’t know that my work screams this was made by a woman. It’s not something I think about.”
Still, she’s indebted to her female friendships. After graduating from the Royal College, Wilding felt isolated. “Students now leave and hang around in a group. They show together, work together and support each other. I didn’t do that.” Instead, she took a studio in a block in Stepney Green (virtually opposite where she lives today), alongside older artists she didn’t know – “I’m sure they thought what I was doing was weird.” It was only when she moved to a new space in Wapping in the late 1970s that she felt part of a community. “Suddenly I was surrounded by a lot of women who were really supportive.”
Last year, she had a show at Gagosian in Paris together with the late Phyllida Barlow, with whom she taught at Brighton Polytechnic in the 1980s, and Rachel Whiteread, who was a student there. “It’s interesting, with someone like Phyllida, because we were really close, but we worked in such different ways,” says Wilding. “She couldn’t stop making work, and she continued to make as much at the end as she ever had done; she had an absolute compulsion. I simply don’t have that. I’m amazed how much work I made in the 80s, one thing after another, and how little work I make now, how much harder it is.”
For Wilding, work comes from work. “It’s always important to be doing something,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what it is.” Often a material she’s stockpiled for years will act as a jumpstart. The most recent piece at Alison Jacques was born out of a couple of strips of rubber she’d rescued from an earlier work, semi-trashed. She discovered them at home and brought them into the studio because she was stuck. “I thought I could start a new work by reshaping the rubber and seeing what would happen.”
Sometimes a material presents itself unexpectedly, as with the smallest work on display: a desiccated frog scaling one wall. She tells me she found it in her cellar a few years ago. “Probably one of the cats had brought it in and it had died through lack of whatever.” This sounds familiar. “It was fully grown, in an amazing frog-like pose, and totally covered with dust, which I meticulously swept off with a paintbrush. It’s set on a piece of copper in a long triangular shape, and it looks as though it’s dancing and being crucified at the same time. A sort of dance of death.”
Too bad we won’t get to see what she could have done with its feathered friend.
Alison Wilding: Testing the Objects of Affection is at Alison Jacques, London, from 20 September to 26 October
