Patricia Wilson-Adams

Patricia Wilson-Adams

Patricia Wilson-Adams was brought up on an isolated sheep property in the New England region of NSW and it is this environment that has informed her work throughout her life. She has been involved in the Fine Arts since she was 15.  She attended the National Art School, Sydney and later gained an MFA from the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales.

She began intensive work in etching as a student at Atelier 17 in Paris and has worked in many print workshops all over the world – UK, USA and Japan.  She has exhibited both prints and sculpture in many major regional galleries including Moree, Tamworth, Taree, Burnie, Newcastle, Gosford and Maitland.  She has been represented in many prize exhibitions, winning several prizes including the Burnie Print Prize in 2017. Her most recent artist-in-residency was at Watch this space in Alice Springs in November, 2019.

 A major survey exhibition stain me with the intensity of black was shown at Newcastle Art Gallery in 2018.    

Patricia Wilson-Adams had a long career as an academic at The University of Newcastle where she taught Printmaking, Drawing and Sculpture electives.  She was supervisor to many PhD and MFA candidates.

Her work focuses on issues surrounding the environment, cultural landscapes and land usage and she could be best described as being a polyvalent artist.  She sites her work within the philosophical framework of Ecophenomenology, while her Post Minimalist approach is considered to be, in Lucy Lippard’s sense, “eccentric abstraction”.  Her work is not didactic, but is reductive, uninsistent and without angst or irony.  She uses metaphor often accentuated by the materiality of her work and she often references literature.  She works in sculpture, installation, and print media as well as being an arts writer.