Vanessa Wilson’s paintings are in constant flux—figures caught in moments of transition, landscapes that pulse with energy and instability, colours that shift and resist containment. Her upcoming 2025 exhibition, The Departure Lounge, at Aleph Contemporary is more than a meditation on travel or transit—it is an exploration of the spaces we inhabit temporarily, the moments between departure and arrival, and the ways memory reshapes reality.
For Wilson, these themes are deeply personal. She has spent her life in motion, moving from country to country, following her parents’ careers and later forging her own path. Born in Karachi in 1969, she spent her early years in Australia, before later living in London, Scotland, and Spain. Each place has left its mark—not just as a backdrop but as a sensory experience, a psychological imprint.
“Environment does impact my work, but often it can be the memory of a place that forms the basis of a painting,” she explains. “Colour and shape, sometimes impressionistic in nature, create a land or cityscape, and the inclusion of figures generates a narrative that the viewer can interpret as they like.”
Wilson is not a painter concerned with fixed narratives. Instead, she navigates the psychological terrain of movement, the threshold between states of being, and the way memory distorts, abstracts, and reinvents place. Her work evokes the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the unsettling familiarity of Freud’s uncanny, the spatial poetry of Bachelard, and the existential urgency of Sartre.
Commanding Colour: The Emotional Force of Paint
Wilson doesn’t just use colour—she wields it. Her canvases hum with intensity, where acidic yellows collide with moody blues, burnt oranges bleed into deep purples, and bruised pinks hover between warmth and unease. These aren’t arbitrary choices; they are deliberate, instinctive, psychological.
She draws from Pierre Bonnard’s layering techniques, admiring how he overpaints darks with luminous hues to create an impression of shifting light and space. But where Bonnard’s work lingers in the domestic, Wilson pushes her compositions into something more ambiguous, more charged. Her relationship with colour has the fearlessness of the Fauves—like Matisse and Derain, she uses pigment to construct emotion rather than describe reality.
“I get in a muddle with my colours,” she admits. “Sometimes I push too far, and I have to pull back. But that’s what I like—when a painting starts to resist you, when it forces you to respond in a way you didn’t plan.”
Wilson’s paintings are not passive—they demand engagement. Colour in her work dictates mood, disrupts expectations, and pulls the viewer into an environment that is both recognisable and elusive. “I often do everything in very strong colours,” she reflects, “but it’s quite nice when things are a bit softer. You can find something different in them.”
Between the Seen and the Felt: A Phenomenological Approach
Wilson’s approach to perception aligns with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—where to see is not just to observe, but to feel through the body. In her work, figures and landscapes do not sit within strict spatial confines; instead, they dissolve, merge, and reform. Light and shadow, rendered in broad, expressive strokes, do not simply exist around her subjects but become part of them, as though memory is altering the reality of the scene.
Her paintings have a haptic quality, as if they could be physically moved through. This is a world of perception, not documentation—an experience of space rather than an image of it.
Departures & The Uncanny: The Poetics of Space
There is a deep uncanniness in Wilson’s paintings. Figures stand before vast structures, surrounded by familiar yet warped landscapes. Some appear frozen in contemplation, while others are caught mid-motion, moving through spaces that seem neither entirely real nor entirely imagined.
This aligns with Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny—where the familiar becomes strange, distorted, unsettling. These are not neutral spaces; they are charged with past encounters, unspoken narratives, and a quiet sense of unease.
Her interest in architectural forms, shifting perspectives, and the liminality of airports, train stations, and transient spaces echoes Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space—a book that explores how spaces hold memory, how the places we pass through shape our psychological landscape.
“I’ve always loved old books, old photographs,” she says. “I take images from the 30s, 40s, 50s, but then I stop looking at them, so the reference becomes more of a feeling than a copy.”
Collage, Abstraction, and the Act of Construction
Wilson does not begin her paintings with a rigid plan. Instead, she starts with collage, a medium that allows her to deconstruct images, play with composition, and resist control.
“Collage lets me break things apart without rules,” she explains. “When I paint, I sometimes feel burdened by rules—things I’ve absorbed from other artists, things that tell me something isn’t quite right. But with collage, I let go of that.”
Her final paintings retain this sense of dynamic movement, where figures emerge and dissolve, where objects hover between recognition and abstraction.
The Departure Lounge: A Statement of Intent
The Departure Lounge is not solely an exhibition title; it is a concept loaded with meaning. Initially inspired by airports and train stations, it has expanded into a broader meditation on liminality, movement, and memory—the threshold between past and future, the physical act of leaving intertwined with psychological transformation, and the way places imprint on us, their recollection shifting with time.
Wilson’s figures exist within this state of transition—a woman with a suitcase stands before a circular portal, poised on the edge of departure; another moves through a landscape that is neither fully solid nor entirely imagined. In one scene, two people shake hands, yet their forms dissolve into the surroundings, their encounter both unfolding and fading into memory.
These are not fixed narratives; they are moments held in tension—open-ended, in flux, unresolved.
Existentialism & The Act of Departure
Wilson’s work resonates with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, where movement defines being. Sartre argued that we are only real in motion, that identity is formed through action, and Wilson’s paintings embody this existential tension. Her figures are rarely static—mid-stride, mid-gesture, mid-thought—caught in fleeting moments where an implied ‘before’ and ‘after’ underscore the transience of experience. Even the landscapes shift, their forms resisting stability, existing instead on the edge of transformation. For Wilson, this is not just a philosophical idea but a lived reality. Having uprooted her life countless times, she understands the feeling of not quite belonging, of constantly adapting, of being shaped by the places left behind. Her work does not offer easy resolutions; rather, it invites the viewer to inhabit the moment of transition—to feel the uncertainty, the energy, and the movement.
Vanessa Wilson: A Painter Going Places
As The Departure Lounge approaches in November 2025, Wilson steps forward with intention, her work evolving in ways that feel both inevitable and entirely her own.
