Gallery
Yemisi Wilson —Stone, the form, and its structure
Contemporary stone sculptures by Swedish–Nigerian artist Yemisi Wilson. Working in a wide range of media from marble, to granite, alabaster, and bronze, and more. She explores heritage, identity, and the enduring language of stone.
Recent Work
As Seen on Instagram
Follow Yemisi’s studio practice as new sculptures take shape—from the first marks in stone to completed works, installations, and exhibitions. Her Instagram offers a glimpse into the rhythms of carving, the character of different materials, and the ongoing dialogue between artist and stone.
Yemisi at her Studio
When I get to Vinterviken, where Yemisi Wilson has her studio, the sun is at its zenith and the noise of the city seems remote. A creative murmur has replaced it, and Yemisi is standing outside wearing a protective mask, holding her grinder at the ready…
Read the full article here
When I get to Vinterviken, where Yemisi Wilson has her studio, the sun is at its zenith and the noise of the city seems remote. A creative murmur has replaced it, and Yemisi is standing outside wearing a protective mask, holding her grinder at the ready. Once inside, we have coffee and talk about a coming exhibition. And about stone. Yemisi’s knowledge of the subject is profound, and she eagerly shares it with others. The studio teems with figures in everything from yellow marble from Sienna to sandstone and gray granite. Their scale runs from miniatures to the monumental. Yemisi’s sculptures are figurative; the works tend to manifest naturalistic precision – something that’s extra clear in her animal portraits. Here there’s an evident connection to the classical Italian heritage in sculpture, which she is also trained in. She finds it difficult to work with conceptual ideas and avoids sullying her art with theoretical frameworks. In her work with human portraits in porphyry, she abandoned the outright figurative in favor of a dialog with abstraction. The properties of porphyry are very different from those of, say, marble, where the softness invites you to create layers of playfulness in the lines, in the spaces between the convex and the concave. Porphyry is brittle yet very hard—the hardest stone Yemisi has ever worked with. It soon became evident that she couldn’t use her chisel to work sculpturally; instead, she had to rely on coarser tools and thereby find new entry points into the material. Familiar approaches had to give way to what the tools permitted. And that’s precisely where Yemisi’s strength lies: She allows her fascination and curiosity to trump frustration and fear of the unexplored.
2022
Exhibition on the island of Oaxen in Ettan’s lime kiln.
“Ancestors” Solo exhibition at Galleri Artsight, Stockholm.
There’s a thread connecting how Yemisi approaches each new assignment: she often dwells in the sphere of memory. She moves between an unconscious collective memory, the history of the place, and her own connotations of events, occurrences, and places.
When I see Yemisi’s animal heads, I want to greet them in the same way I would greet a real animal, and if it were possible, I would like to greet them as an animal would greet another animal. The sculptures bring me down to this extraordinarily intimate level.
Yemisi Wilson has a unique position in the Stockholm art scene as a classically trained artist working in Sweden, who is also operating in the contemporary art scene.