Alison Wilding RA

Born: 1948

Alison Wilding RA

Alison Wilding is an English sculptor, born in Blackburn, Lancashire on July 7th 1948. She studied at the Nottingham College of Art, the  Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in Chislehurst, Kent from 1967 to 1970 and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1970 to 1973. She rose to prominence in the late 70's around the same time as Richard Deacon, Bill Woodrow and Tony Cragg.

Wildings' early works are multi-media installations, but she is best known for her later abstract sculptures which use a wide variety of materials: as well as traditional materials such as wood, stone and bronze, she has used steel, wax, silk and other materials. These are often used in unusual combinations: Stormy Weather (1987), for example, is made from pigment, beeswax and oil rubbed into galvanised steel.

In 1991, a major retrospective of Wilding's work, Alison Wilding: Immersion Sculpture from Ten Years, was held at Tate Liverpool. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1992, and made a Royal Academician in 1999. Her only large-scale public artwork "Ambit" was installed in the River Wear at Sunderland in 1999, taking the form of a necklace of stainless-steel tubes floating in the river, and lit up from underwater at night. It was subsequently exhibited in the Manchester Ship Canal and is now in storage.

Alison has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1970, including;

The Serpentine Gallery, London (1985)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1987/8)
Tate Liverpool (1991)
Musee des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelles de Calais in 1996.

Her most recent major solo exhibition was Contract at the Henry Moore Foundation (2000/01). Alison has also been involved in several major public commissions including Ambit, installed early 1998 on the River Wear in Sunderland.

Alison lives and works in London.