Alison Wilding is running late. Her cat brought a bird into the house this morning (“Dead or alive?” I ask, to which she responds, “Neither”) and she couldn’t face wringing its neck. She put it in a box and phoned a friend, and when they lifted the lid the bird flew away. As we settle into her studio – a mostly monochrome space in a railway arch in east London – I suggest it was a happy ending then, and she looks sceptical.
The 76-year-old British sculptor has a career-spanning exhibition opening at Alison Jacques gallery in London this week. It’s called Testing the Objects of Affection and over the rumble of trains she tells me it’s about her relationship with the works on display, which she shaped between 1975 and the present. “It’s a test every time you show things, every time you open yourself up to the public gaze, whatever that is.” Is it daunting? “I don’t give a shit,” she replies, with just a hint of a grin. “I say that, but I will. I think it’s going to be OK actually – well, I hope so – but anything can happen.”
