Grantown-based artist Joanna Wilson returns to OPENSPACE with a solo exhibition exploring the various ‘languages’ she speaks as a working mother in rural Scotland. Drawing on the sociolinguistic concept of code-switching, she translates the chaotic and often contradictory realities of modern womanhood into the vibrant figurative abstractions for which she is best known.

Chaos and control, voice and silence, selfhood and service: these are the tensions that animate her picture spaces. While some feel melancholy in tone, perhaps reflecting the emotional toll of code-switching on command, others seem to celebrate the endless and life-affirming possibilities of creating art under such dynamic circumstances.

We see the female form set free on an abstract ground—spontaneous, uninhibited—yet at the same time confined by the relentless and repetitive mark-making of the background and, of course, the picture frame itself. Each artwork is representative of lived experience, revealing the subtle and sometimes overwhelming recalibrations women make as they flex and adapt to meet the unspoken demands of the various spaces they occupy.

In her signature energetic style, the artist shows us how contemporary code-switching results in a constantly evolving syntax of self—for better or worse.