Mallary Wilson 2026

Abstract

Materia/conditions explores human consciousness through materiality, positioning geological, monolithic structures as Affective bodies both ancient and immediate. These forms do not represent the artist's body; they are erupting bodies of their own. A mountain has a name but is never considered separate from the earth. They stand individually in their connectivity. Each work externalizes what forms beneath the impact of stimulus on material. This is Affect. It is the intensity of a stimulus moving through matter before it is captured by language. It is sediment of living, allowing Affect to surface and solidify into something that can be witnessed without being defined. They are cut apart and cut together: the geological, the biological, the beautiful, and the grotesque. Visually similarities are made systemic to illuminate shared origin and a connectivity that does not dissolve boundaries so much as reveal they were never fixed. These monoliths do not represent individual feelings but rather solidified affect: the eruption of interior life made tangible and offered to the viewer as a reflectionless mirror. The question they pose is not aesthetic but ontological. Is it possible to feel the connection of consciousness to the material of the body? Drawing on Karen Barad's agential realism, the work resists frameworks that position consciousness as separate from matter. Consciousness is not a layer placed over the material body but something wholly emergent from it. The shimmering ribbons, the multi-materiality, and the bright geological forms are not symbols of the mind. They are its conditions: what produces something and its state of being. This is a practice co-constituted by collective affect and a materially emergent mind. A reminder that what moves through one also moves through others and the intangible can be communicated precisely by refusing to translate it.