Graham Wilson

FEATURED ARTIST

Graham Wilson

Graham studied printmaking at TAFE and university in Newcastle, majoring in the medium and experimenting with a broad range of techniques. It was woodcut that particularly captured his attention, influenced by medieval European printmaking, artists such as Albrecht Dürer and, later, German Expressionism.

He was attracted not only to the physical process of carving, but to the history of the woodcut as a way of telling stories.

Historically, images could communicate ideas to audiences who may not have been able to read. Graham began thinking about how that same visual language might be used to tell a contemporary environmental story.

That led him to the Green Man, the ancient image of a face formed from or surrounded by leaves. Graham began developing a series of medieval-style woodcuts imagining the Green Man bringing environmental thinking to Newcastle.

The city itself seemed an appropriate setting. Newcastle Cathedral dominated the skyline in much the same way a cathedral might have defined a medieval city, surrounded by lower buildings and terraces.

But something changed as Graham worked on the series.

While carving the blocks, he realised he was becoming more interested in the carved timber itself than in the prints it produced.

“I realised I actually really liked the look of the wood, more than the actual print.”

Rather than treating the block simply as a tool for making another artwork, Graham began exhibiting the carved wood itself, adding colour to the surface. It was a decision made around 35 years ago, and one that has continued to shape his practice.

Landscape and environmental memory

Environmental concerns in Graham’s work are closely connected to his childhood and family.

Growing up in north-western New South Wales, he remembers an abundance of small birds, including tiny finches, which later largely disappeared from the landscape as broadacre agriculture expanded.

His grandfather, George, was another important influence. He established an early native plant nursery and spent years advocating for the use of Australian plants at a time when convincing people to grow them was considerably more difficult than it is today.

That enthusiasm for native plants passed through Graham’s mother and into his own thinking about the environment.

“I could see the logic. Why aren’t we growing native plants instead of introduced plants?”

The idea that people could be surrounded by a landscape without necessarily understanding it became central to Graham’s early work. Just as medieval imagery could communicate to people who were unable to read written texts, he began thinking about images as a way of addressing what he saw as a kind of environmental illiteracy.

That connection between landscape and storytelling remains present in his work today.

Following the work

Graham’s practice has never followed a single straight line.

Like many artists, he has supported his practice through other work, including government printing, teaching visual art and graphic design. Those occupations inevitably influenced what he was making at the time.

While working extensively with computers and graphic design, for example, he developed a series of portraits of Newcastle’s mid-century architecture.

Later, an interest in the craft and decoration of buildings led him to study stonemasonry and stone carving.

He became fascinated by the period when Australian architecture was beginning to develop a visual language of its own, with native plants and animals appearing in decorative brickwork, ceramics and carved stone.

That training eventually produced an unexpected opportunity.

A stone carver organising a festival in Trondheim found Graham through an online search and invited him to Norway to carve a Green Man. Graham later returned and spent three months working at Trondheim’s cathedral, carving leaves and elements of a tracery window.

It connected his contemporary practice directly to the medieval craftsmanship that had first influenced his printmaking decades earlier.

Making the project anyway

One of the recurring ideas in Graham’s practice is simply deciding to make something happen.

He has applied for grants and residencies over the years and, often, been unsuccessful. Rather than allowing a funding decision to determine whether a project exists, he has increasingly chosen to fund projects himself.

“I think a grant is like the word has a clue in it. It’s granting you permission to do the project. So in defiance of that, I just do the project anyway.”

One such project grew from Graham’s memories of the Warrumbungles and of Mini Land, a small theme park near Coonabarabran that he remembers visiting as a child.

Its enormous concrete dinosaurs and coin-operated roars had once made it feel, to him, like a local Disneyland.

Returning to the area many years later brought those memories back. Graham decided to create an exhibition celebrating the place, inviting the local community to contribute photographs, souvenirs and stories.

Rather than waiting for funding, he hired a gallery and made the exhibition happen.

That impulse became even stronger following the deaths of his mother and brother within a short period.

Grief heightened Graham’s awareness of time and mortality.

“I thought, well, I’ve just got to try and make as much work as I can.”

Art as a reason to travel

Travel has increasingly become both a source of work and a way of sustaining Graham’s practice.

After a planned trip to Japan was cancelled during COVID, Graham and his partner Jane travelled instead to Tasmania. A brief visit became the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Tasmanian landscape.

After visiting Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake, Graham made a work for the Glover Prize. It was not selected.

Rather than abandoning the idea, he remade the work at the much larger scale he had originally wanted. That version was selected the following year.

The experience helped establish a model Graham and Jane have continued to follow: travel somewhere together, make work responding to the experience, exhibit it, and, when works sell, use those funds to help make the next journey possible.

Those journeys have since taken Graham to landscapes including the Kimberley, Uluru and Tasmania.

A return to Tasmania led to a search for some of the tallest trees in the Southern Hemisphere. With the help of a tree guide, Graham found and studied these forests, eventually producing an exhibition titled Forest of the Giants.

More recently, he took part in the Bob Brown Foundation’s environmental art residency in takayna / Tarkine, camping in the wilderness alongside other artists and producing work for a fundraising exhibition.

Beauty is only the beginning

Graham’s landscapes are not simply records of beautiful places.

For him, beauty creates the opportunity to ask another question.

“I don’t just do them because I want to say, ‘Isn’t this landscape beautiful?’ I want to say, ‘Isn’t this landscape beautiful? Why aren’t we protecting it?’”

That distinction sits at the centre of his work.

The giant trees depicted in Forest of the Giants, for example, were extraordinary precisely because their continued existence could not be taken for granted.

Even the absence of people in Graham’s landscapes is deliberate.

National parks, he observes, can sometimes present themselves as preserved fragments of a landscape from before European colonisation, while overlooking the fact that people were an essential part of those environments.

His landscapes are often empty as a way of drawing attention to that contradiction.

They may appear peaceful, untouched and timeless, but underneath them sits another story.

For Graham Wilson, that story is ultimately what makes the image worth making.

Follow Graham Wilson

Instagram:  graham_wilson_artist

Website: carvedgreenman.com

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