Maree Wilson was born in Waitakere
City in 1968. She was raised in Helensville and now divides her
time between her home at Muriwai Beach and Hokianga, where she is a
senior tutor in the Diploma and Certificate courses for Applied
Arts at NorthTec, Rawene. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from
the University of Auckland and a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Much of Wilson's practice has been
anchored in the landscape, her work questioning our relationship
with our environment. In earlier series of work, Wilson
employed pale washes laid over a network of intersecting lines and
circles anchored by the vaguest of horizon lines. These works evoke
images of water, atmospheric disturbance and erosion - the
landscape suspended in the animation of nature.
As her career has progressed, Wilson
has taken to drilling and
gouging holes in the surface of works on board, slowly
moving from the abstraction of landscape to a self-reflective
insistence on the surface of the work and the process of making.
These holes, with their organic, virus-like population of the
surface, seek to introduce real space into the paintings, a
movement that Wilson describes as 'a piercing of two dimensional
space which inescapably links the work to the spectator in a bodily
way'.
Wilson has held a number of solo exhibitions in Auckland and
Sydney as well as participating in both national and international
group shows in Melbourne, Sydney, London, Christchurch, Waikato and
Auckland. She was judged Winner of the Waitakere Art Award in 1993
and nominated as a finalist in the 1998 Royal Overseas League
exhibition in London. In 2003 & 2004, Wilson was a finalist in
the Siemens RMIT Fine Arts Scholarship Exhibitions and in 2005
& 2009 she was judged a finalist in the Waikato Contemporary
Art Award.