Inspired by the human body and her own experiences, Lindsey Wilson creates art that’s whimsical and expressive.

The fourth-year Fine Art student takes a multidisciplinary approach — her main form focuses are sculpting and printmaking.

Her most recent collection of sculptures, entitled On the Mend, is loosely representational of organs in the human body, such as hearts, lungs and other organs that the viewer may perceive these sculptures as.

“These works are ceramic and crochet,” Wilson said. “I made a bunch of objects that aren’t directly representational, but I’m referencing organs and hearts — that kind of stuff.”

The works in this collection portray a juxtaposition between the use of cool ceramics and soft textile materials such as yarn.

“I was working with crochet last year so it’s not a brand new thing for me,” Wilson said. “I’ve been incorporating it into my work for a while now. It came naturally so I thought I could attach flexible ‘veins’ to the ceramics as long as I have holes to stitch the yarn into.”

This concept is distinctive in itself, but the collection symbolises deeper ideas tied to Wilson’s life experiences.

“My work has been representing the body for a while,” she said. “Last semester my dad had open heart surgery and it was a really weird experience — I started looking at the body in a completely different way.

“I was dealing with the female body before and then I shifted it a little bit. While this work isn’t directly about that, it’s really influenced by that experience — I was starting to think about what’s going on inside of the body and how that affects the way you carry yourself and interact with society.”

Art has been Wilson’s way of expressing her thoughts about concepts such as clothing and how they relate to art in society.

“Clothing has a very lovely association to the body already,” Wilson said. “They really have this intimate connection — I thought it would be interesting to invert that.

“Clothes are usually a protective layer that you wear to cover yourself, or to represent yourself to the world, and I thought it’d be interesting to invert that relationship to relate them to what’s going on inside of the body as opposed to something that covers or protects it.”

The artist enjoys being immersed in the actual processes that make up sculpting and printmaking.

“I love stuff that has a lot of steps to it,” Wilson said. “A process that I can really get involved in is something I kind of gravitate towards.” In terms of printmaking, Wilson takes comfort in the steady accumulation of images that come to life before her eyes.

“You create your drawing and image, and then go through all these steps to execute it,” Wilson said. “It’s nice to slow things down a little bit — you stop thinking too hard about it and just focus on getting the image to exist on the page, which I really like.”

The artist’s work has also been heavily influenced by her gender studies minor.

“Since I’ve been dealing with the body a lot, being able to study the broader social implications of what I’m doing or the ideas around my art has changed a lot of things for me,” Wilson said. “I really like where things are going right now.”

In terms of her future plans, Wilson plans to pursue fine art through a Master’s degree.

“I want to keep making art for the rest of my life,” Wilson said. “Something I really want to do is teach at the university level.”

Wilson’s collection On the Mend is currently on display at the Union Gallery.