HOLLY WILSON
I came to know encaustic through a back door . I was living in the Chicago in a third floor apartment with no way to bronze cast or fire clay . I had been creating these relief plaster panels , and one day while visiting a gallery I saw a piece that had a very similar surface and inquired more about the material . Encaustic was something I had heard about briefly in my undergraduate art history class but never paid much mind to after that point . I began researching encaustic and trying my hand in the material , this is where I fell in love , encaustic , that smell , such a wonderful smell , especially compared to bronze casting .
The encaustic work I create is much more from a place of the unconscious . I ’ m more interested in laying down texture and then pulling out images that appear or start to develop . Once that process begins I then start to bring the concise mind back on board .
In my sculptures I am very much the opposite . I start with an idea and then build a very direct story line from that beginning . The sculptures are bronze cast and have many layers of process and some works can take years to manifest . While for me encaustic is one of those materials that , when I sit down to make something whether it be a bird a girl or a bear , I know that whatever I make I can unmake and move over with a few moves of a hot tool . In bronze once it is cast you feel like a salmon swimming up stream to make that kind of change .
The encaustic surface was very similar to the work I was doing in my bronze but there are not a million steps after you made the image . When I work in encaustic the color is there the marks are as I made them and this immediacy and unknown aspects of the material is intoxicating .