Georg Wilson, Bejewelled (2025). Photo credit: Eva Herzog. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.

Georg Wilson

The Earth Exhales

Georg Wilson’s paintings imagine a wild natural landscape untouched by humanity. Her scenes of hollow moons and trailing roots are populated instead by creatures: clawed, hairy, prowling figures who crouch close to the earth, entangled with the undergrowth. These creatures are more animal than any gender. They live completely outside human hierarchies or paradigms. Unlike humanity’s extractive, destructive relationship to nature, Wilson’s creatures simply exist amongst it. They enact no labour over the landscape. They behave as any other animal would, creeping amongst the hedges, indifferent to the viewer’s gaze.

At Jupiter Artland, strange realms and fantasies feel close at hand. The hidden interior worlds of artists manifest amongst nature, entwining and changing with the seasons. The magic is tangible. A glimpse of a sculpture, unexpectedly caught through gnarled branches in the woodland, appears like a darting Puck. Walking through the landscape is comparable to reading a fairytale, one follows the narrative, immersed, to emerge the other end somehow changed. 

Wilson’s painting practice follows the changing seasons, allowing the subject matter, mark-making, and colour palette to shift with the turn of the year. ‘The Earth Exhales’ encapsulates the lull of summer, when the air is thick and drenched with pollen, and a hazy green stillness has smothered the land. A reoccurring motif in the exhibition is the rose chafer beetle, a metallic, gem-like creature. Rose chafers wriggle from the soil in late summer to feed on rotting vegetation, tree stumps and flowers. Summer is aptly represented by the rose chafer, a beautiful bright thing that feeds off the overripe and the dead. ‘The earth exhales’ and tires, beginning the process of dying back, waning into autumn.

This body of work is the most verdant of Wilson’s so far. Curling tendrils of green engulf figures and fallen trees alike. The history of painting the “green and pleasant” countryside of Britain is intrinsically tied to the history of land ownership in this country. Landscape paintings were traditionally commissioned by landed gentry to portray land as property: a curated, tamed view, depopulated of the people who once depended on that land for their homes and livelihoods before the enclosures across Britain. Even the word “landscape”, derived from the Dutch “landschap”, entered the English language in the 1500s exclusively to describe the genre of painting, not the land itself. Wilson prefers the paintings of Samuel Palmer, which record not the history of the ownership of Britain, but a wild vision of enormous moons bathing strange cold light over glowing fields, and horse chestnut trees ablaze with shining golden rays.

Wilson’s vision is in opposition to this history of landscape. She paints the “para-pastoral”, a fetishized, strange and “other” rural world that exists outside our full understanding. Nature is a wild thing, sprouting to the edges of each painting, undulating through the soil and running green through the veins of a creature. Wilson’s oozing, twisting brushstrokes interlace everything together, from wet earth to matted hair into a wild ecosystem.

The exhibition also includes Wilson’s wooden cut-out paintings, a fallen tree and a cluster of beetles which set the scene, bringing nature into the gallery. Hanging in the Ballroom Gallery at Jupiter Artland from October 11th, the paintings face the gardens’ trees and billowing hedges through the windows like a mirror, twisting towards each other, creating their own magic realm.