the artist/
Meg Wilson is a scholar, educator, & interdisciplinary artist. They are a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA candidate in the time-based media area of the Studio Art department. Wilson’s research and practice focus on queer-feminist ecological theorizing, politics of multi-species care practices, contemporary land-relations and critical settler studies. They received a BA in Art History with minors in Sculpture and Intermedia and Appalachian Studies from Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky and an MA in Studio Art from UW Madison.
Wilson has participated in group and solo exhibitions including Seen: Unseen at the UW Madison Arboretum Longenecker Horticultural Gardens. Their photographs have been shown and published widely, including in TIME magazine, Oxford American, Appalachian Reckoning, Still: the Journal, and the 2023 book Sown in the Stars: Planting by the Signs (UPK). Their work is held in collection at the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.
Their most recent body of work is a practice of care: assembling caring relation and means of relating otherwise to isolated sidewalk trees in Madison, Wisconsin. This work has resonances with contemporary ecological art practices that envision borderless worlds of thriving, such as Maria Thereza Alves’s Seeds of Change, Dan Feinberg’s Plants in Pavement projects,and Špela Petrič’s Skotopoiesis. These and Wilson’s work expand possibilities for making worlds as otherwise assemblages of plant-and-(human)animal entanglement, and reconsider possibilities for ecological aesthetics beyond maintenance, conservation, and preservation of the current configurations.
Wilson is a 2024/2025 Arboretum Research Fellow, and the winner of the Inaugural Nelson Institute Art & Environment award.
They lead the CHE research grant-funded working group called Underheard: the Sounds of City Soils, which explores the intersection of urban acoustic ecologies and arboreal humanities. This collaboration with acoustic engineering student Dajun Zhang works to translate the vibrations at the root zone into audio, visual and tactile engagements to create new possibilities for cross-species understanding with the plants that share sidewalk space.
A 2023-24 Marie Christine Kohler Fellow with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), Wilson worked with Engineering student Tanuj Kumar on Plant Precept, a gallery installation proposal for a group exhibition of ecologically-concerned work. Not to be confused with Nature Art, the ecologically concerned works in this show recognize the more-than-human living beings in urban contexts and consider the porous imaginary borders between urban and rural. Acknowledging human entanglements with other forms of nature, and the complex land ethics that result when other perspectives are given as much weight as the human, the included artworks will be challenging and create new possibilities for becoming response-able to our others. Themes addressed by the works include migration, assisted migration, queer ecologies, plant senses, and the space of possibility that exists in art/science and science/art.