Ruby Wilkinson, Birding

Gestural and emotive, Wilkinson’s paintings carry an irrepressible spontaneity, their surfaces alive with movement and atmosphere. In Birding, she turns her attention skyward, tracing the elusive forms of birds in flight. Flickers of ochre, cadmium orange, and storm-grey dissolve into layered skies, where figures hover on the cusp of legibility before dissolving again into colour. Wilkinson’s brushwork—scrubbed, feathered, and looped—recalls both the rituals of daily life and the sudden arcs of flight. Her canvases hold moments of suspension, where beginnings and endings blur, where something fleeting is briefly held.

Rather than fixed depictions, these works evoke the sensation of seeing and feeling at once—the glimmer of connection before it slips from view. Birds, with their transitory and borderless movement, become emblems of liberation, resistance, and unknowability. In Wilkinson’s hands, they remain sovereign: fluid forms that invite our attention yet resist possession.

Rooted in intuitive process and material experimentation, Wilkinson’s practice is shaped by the coastal blues and greys of Te Whanganui-a-Tara and the forest greens of her Titirangi upbringing. Through her paintings she offers spaces for intimacy, reflection, and slow looking—painting as a way of sensing.

An essay by Kirsty Baker accompanies the show.

Birding, Ruby Wilkinson  

By Kirsty Baker 

The evening was naked and transparent, without beginning or end. Birds, agile and black, darted sharply through the pure air, they flew so swiftly that no human eye could accompany their flight. 

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 1943 

In the painting Near to, named for Clarice Lispector’s remarkable stream-of-consciousness novel Near to the Wild Heart, Ruby Wilkinson depicts a dense cluster of birds, their flight stalled in mid-air. The borders of their bodies blur and bleed together, an entangled mass of form, gesture and colour. Their dark solidity gives way to the dusk-bruised sky, flecks of cadmium orange and golden yellow burnishing their contours. Glimpsed in motion, these birds evade the fixity of our gaze. Beyond the painting’s frame, no human eye could accompany their flight.  

The inadequacies of visual comprehension are traced across Wilkinson’s newest paintings, almost all of which depict birds captured in flight against a series of richly layered skies. In the works Hosting and Yes, and, for example, she traces dissolved outlines, looping swirls of earth-bright orange conveying the momentary sweep of a body as it plunges across the sky. Unlike the dense bodily mass of Near to, these linear forms are filled only with sky. Their gestural depiction offers us an experience Lispector might describe as ‘closer to feeling then perception,’ as sky, bird and human come – momentarily – into connection through this fleeting moment of vision.   

This sense of momentum suggests a dissolution of form and solidity. 
Thick line traces a disintegrating trail of movement. 
Ochre crescents puncture an expansive field of blue. 
Gestural swoops of pigment dissipate into formlessness. 

Though each of these painterly gestures elicits a sense of disintegration, this is not the splintered fragmentation of destruction. Rather, Wilkinson evokes a liberatory sense of form becoming unbound, the repetition of her subject-matter creating inordinate scope for mutability and experimentation. The loose liquidity of Wilkinson’s birds carries a sense of momentum across the canvas, where their dynamic forms sit lightly upon the surface. The birds’ fluid movement is rendered in sharp contrast to the cumulative density of the skies they fly across, which are at once mutable and vast. Created through a time consuming accumulation and partial erasure of numerous fine layers of paint, Wilkinson builds these skies to contain a complex spectrum of colour, each semi-transparent stratum interacting with those that lie beneath. As subsequent layers of paint have been laid down, stripped back and repainted, the membrane between each hovers between opacity and transparency, solidity and fragility. 

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Here I am, returned to the body. To return to my body. When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. 

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 1943 

In Near to the Wild Heart, Lispector grapples with what it might mean to come to know yourself. Through the internal monologue of Joana, the book’s narrator, Lispector traces an internal, and at times contradictory, journey towards a growing sense of freedom. Written in a fragmentary, cumulative form, the book pieces together an incomplete account of personal liberation – it offers an internal, lyrical consideration of what it might mean to become free within the confines of your body, your self, and your prescribed place in the world. Viewed through the prism of Lispector’s novel, Wilkinson’s birds move out beyond the painterly frame.  

Both talismanic and evasive, birds have become expansive vehicles for the projection of our own – very human – hopes and fears. In the wild, their flight is truly trans-national, one of the few forms of movement entirely heedless of the human desire to demarcate and control borders, to politicize mobility and wield it as a tool of power. In a world so violently stratified by such forms of power, the symbolism of the bird flying free has frequently become a profound symbol of resistance and liberation. In Birding Wilkinson posits her birds in ways that evoke feeling, rather than the sharp clarity of vision. Here, she seems to say, are fleeting moments of emotive lucidity, the flash of awareness before these creatures fly free from our vision, evading our gaze and the strictures of human control.  

In of late, this elusive moment of connection escapes us. The canvas seems to stretch across ocean, land and sky, broad swathes of inky pigment marking out an indeterminate landscape. Searching in vain for a bird, I feel strangely bereft in the face of their absence. Despite this, my eyes remain skyward, seeking out that flash of movement, that blur and hum of flight. 

Playing with the profound contradiction that lies at the heart of our relationship to birds, Wilkinson’s paintings urge us to pay them more considered attention. For all their familiarity, though, these birds remain utterly illegible and unknowable. Despite our projections, they remain entirely sovereign. Through her tender, magnetic paintings, Wilkinson reminds us that though we will never be able to accompany their flight, we should – perhaps – become more attuned to the lessons they have to offer us.