Ainsley Wilcock
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Ainsley Wilcock (b. 1990) is an Australian artist whose practice includes primarily painting, drawing, and other works on paper.
Ainsley is intrigued by the human tendency to seek and draw out meaning from mimetic qualities of arbitrary and everyday stimulus. Creating strange, composite forms she explores a perceived relationship between pareidolia and the anthropomorphic grotesque. Her work predominantly explores the grotesque in relation to bodily traces and the marginalia of life (such as dust and detritus). The boundary of the body is grotesque in essence; where it is at play and in flux. Ainsley explores these boundaries of the body through the grotesque transgressions of exaggeration, extravagance and excess.
Examining the haunting relationship between presence and absence and the playful tension inherent to grotesque image traditions, these still life composites play on human perceptions of the self, the other, and the imaginative and interpretive processes in how we tend to perceive and construe patterns and forms.
Presence and absence (materiality of absence) collapse in upon each other through considerations of shadow, puppetry, empty piles of clothing, and other bodily traces.
There are empty clothes and there is empty space, yet inhabited clothes and inhabited space; drawing attention to the possibilities of a metaphysical life and the promise of, or capacity for something more.
The grotesque serves Ainsley’s art not only as an aesthetic category but also as a methodology. She is interested in an understanding of the body as transforming and unconfined; imprinted and imprinting upon. Through exploring a combination of drawing and ‘con/fusing’, trace-making practices she refers to part of her art practice as ‘grotesquing’.
Another significant focus of Ainsley’s art involves capturing and reflecting on everyday life; both past and present moments. Through oil paintings, watercolours, and drawings she aims to convey personal moments in time through small vignettes. Often using old photographs as reference material, she frames, focuses and reflects on aspects and details of these captured moments to quietly ponder on her not-so-distant past. Familial and friendship bonds remain a constant in these small works and studies. Ainsley intends to evoke the essence and mood of these every day moments, happenings, and seemingly inconsequential occurences of back then as well as her here and now.
I acknowledge the Dharawal people as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which I was born, live, and work. I pay respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.