Georg Wilson, The Dream (Henbane), 2025. Image : Eva Herzog
Georg Wilson, Vespertine (Thorn Apple), 2025. Image Eva Herzog
Looking at a Georg Wilson painting is like stepping into a time machine. Suddenly, you are projected into the Middle Ages when the Earth was silent and covered with dense and dark forests and humans had the intimate understanding that they were part of the natural world, like plants, animals, rivers. Wilson’s paintings in her new series, Against Nature, are also dark in tones. It could be winter or it could be the moment when day gives way suddenly to night. There are strange celestial objects, like 2 suns or 2 moons in The Dream (henbane). Maybe they are induced by the poisonous plant species that Georg Wilson’s new works are about. In an interview with artnet, Wilson explained she took inspiration from illuminated manuscripts. “Medieval manuscripts come from a time we can’t ever fully realize. I don’t think we can ever fully understand what it would have been like to live in that preindustrial society and that relationship to nature. The celestial bodies of suns, moons, and comets from that medieval culture of image making fascinate me.”
Wilson’s wonderful and thought provoking new exhibition at London’s Pilar Corrias gallery focuses on poisonous plant species - henbane, thorn-apple and nightshade - and on the English countryside before the enclosure of common land in the 18th Century. With the enclosure, knowledge of plants, and poisonous plants in particular, disappeared. Poisonous plants were both dangerous and healing. They were used for medicinal purposes. The knowledge of their properties and how to use them was, mostly, possessed by women and this knowledge was often seen as witchcraft, leading to the persecution of the “witches”.
Throughout Georg Wilson’s paintings, the poisonous plants hold center stage. They literally dominate the landscape. They are beautiful, but also sometimes menacing, just as poisonous plants can be both healing and dangerous. Wilson’s works are infused with a sense of magic. Strange creatures live in their shadow - neither human nor animal, they can feel like spirits of the forest. These creatures just exist, not threatening, not destroying the landscape. They live as animals do, in pacific coexistence with the land.
Born in 1998, Georg Wilson studied art history at Oxford and then received an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art. Her practice explores ecology and history. Her paintings follow the seasons. Humans are absent, replaced by creatures. Her palette changes as the light changes.
Georg Wilson says poisonous plants are still here, everywhere for those who can see. “Suddenly, on walks around London, I noticed that these poisonous plants were growing everywhere,” explains Georg Wilson in artnet. “Near my studio, I saw a thorn apple, which is one of the most poisonous plants that grows wild in the U.K. Its sap is really poisonous. The plant was taller than me with these amazing, architectural, spiky seed pods. It looked so monstrous and intriguing, but I’d never noticed it until having done this reading.”
The artist is part of an art movement loosely called “para pastoral”. In a moment in human history when we are looking at the natural world either with romantic ideas of the past, as an idyllic refuge, or with feelings of doom in the face of its destruction, para pastoral artists cast the countryside “as a disruptive place of confrontation with longstanding myths about nature and nostalgia.” Here, the woods are much darker than in paintings by Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain. With the para pastoral artists there’s a “re-wilding” of nature in art.”
The beauty of Georg Wilson’s paintings is that they attract us into them and take us in a strange and powerful voyage that makes us think more deeply about our present.
– Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Georg Wilson. Against Nature. Pilar Corrias gallery. Until March 7. pilarcorrias.com
Georg Wilson, Host (Cuckoo Pint), 2025. Image: Eva Herzog
