Sally Wilson has delighted us with the illustrations, and uplifting messages within her series of children’s books, the LaLa Chronicles that were launched and exhibited here in 2024, ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ and 2025 ‘Breadth’ with the drawings, sculpture and jewellery of Viktor Kalinowski. Now she elevates once again and really shows us what she can do with her diverse creative talents in ‘Arise’. July 2026 at The Hive.
“In my work, I continue to celebrate the richness inherent in “perfect imperfection.” Increasingly, my practice has become more concerned with what happens when conscious control loosens: in uncertainty, incompleteness, and the unexpected possibilities that emerge through chance.
Much of the work plays with perception. Some pieces reward distance — forms that appear abstract, fragmented or slightly surreal at close range resolve into something more familiar when viewed from afar. Others ask the opposite: to move closer and closer before what is present begins to reveal itself. I’m interested in the active role of seeing — in how we find meaning, complete what has been left unresolved, and make discoveries only possible from altered perspectives.
There is a recurring fascination with movement and becoming: animals caught mid-gesture, forms in transition, or ink finding its own path across a surface without being instructed where to go. Owls, for reasons I am still discovering, have begun appearing with particular insistence. Repeatedly, I return to the interplay between intention and accident — that threshold where conscious direction gives way to something less predictable. There is a point where you let go, and what arrives next is often the most interesting aspect of the work.
It is often the sketches and studies — the preparatory works artists create before the polished final piece — that move me most deeply. There’s freedom, energy and aliveness in those works that the finished version can sometimes lose. It is this quality I continue to pursue in my own practice: not immaculate surfaces or neat predictable resolution, but the breathing, unresolved, still-becoming thing.”
