Artists Jane and Louise Wilson on the duality of experience

I meet Laika first. “She’s a licker,” Jane Wilson warns, as her dog goes for my leg. We’re outside a former east London printworks and Jane’s twin sister Louise is close behind, ready to unlock the door. On the other side is a David Lynch scene: no windows, endless corridors. If you spun me around, I wouldn’t be able to point to the exit.

We settle in their studio and the Newcastle-born artists talk over each other, offering me tea, guiding me to a chair. The walls are covered in their work and a broad table is piled with recent prints. Laika sinks into the sofa and immediately falls asleep. Jane and Louise (both 55) have worked together since their identical degree shows at separate universities in 1989.

In 1999, they were nominated for the Turner Prize for Gamma: a multi-screen installation filmed in a military base. Their work has been exhibited internationally — with shows across Europe, the US and Japan, including at the Guggenheim Bilbao, MoMA and the Tate. In 2018, they were made Royal Academicians, a prestigious role granted by the Royal Academy of Arts. This weekend, their new photographic series I’d Walk With You But Not With Her opens at Maureen Paley’s Studio M, while an installation of their 2012 film The Toxic Camera takes over the gallery’s main space.

Ten years on from its debut at Manchester’s Whitworth gallery, The Toxic Camera feels uncomfortably close. Set in a radioactive waste storage centre just outside of Kyiv, and a former H-bomb test facility in Suffolk, the film partly narrates Ukrainian film-maker Vladimir Shevchenko’s last project: documenting the immediate clean-up operation of the Chernobyl disaster — which happened 36 years ago this week.

When developing the film Shevchenko discovered he had inadvertently recorded radiation: the fizzle of it, its pockmarked vision. He died from radiation exposure less than a year later. His camera had to be buried, having become radioactive. Jane and Louise present a kind-of dreamscape with scripted voiceover made from research and interviews. In one scene, a man walks through a forest as apples hit the ground from an overladen tree. The thuds are tinged with a buzz. The camera crackles, and the sound of nature — moving through tall grass, the call of the wind — grows ominous. Everything emits a radioactive threat.

We live with things we either choose to see, or recognise, or not

The viewer feels like an active, silent witness; devastation a state of ongoing-ness. The specific story hits like analogy. It pinpoints feelings of regret, shame, negligence. “Looking at the piece again,” Louise says, “to think about what mass devastation meant, and what mass devastation means already, now, in the Donbas region and in Mariupol.” She shakes her head.

“We live with things we either choose to see, or recognise, or not,” Jane says.

There’s a doubling effect to The Toxic Camera in installation. It immerses while simultaneously marking distance, reinforcing the act of looking. A bronze replica of Shevchenko’s camera sits in the space as further emphasis. “Bringing in the mirrors either side creates this idea of, not a lens inside a camera, but it does have something of that . . .” Louise searches for the word. “Refraction,” Jane supplies.

Throughout our conversation, they help each other with names, dates, thoughts. Louise motions as if she’s winding wool around her hand as she speaks; Jane clasps hers together. They’re tuned into the same frequency, and are warm and talkative.

Like The Toxic Camera, much of their work focuses on surveillance and the ghost state of afterwards. Their debut London show (Normapaths, 1995) juxtaposed fighting scenes with the later, empty mess. Stasi City (1997) was set in a former East German secret police headquarters. In Face Scripting: What Did the Building See (2011), the artists used dazzle camouflage.

With I’d Walk With You But Not With Her, Jane says, “it’s been a whole sort of odyssey”. They had a three-month residency in 2018 on South Korea’s Gapado island. In 2019, a British Council residency took them to Ise, Japan. There they photographed a sacred shrine known as the Wedded Rocks: two rocks wrapped together with complicatedly bound rope. A typhoon hit, and they were locked in their hotel. Afterwards, the rope was snapped. They had taken a before-shot without knowing. They went back to capture the after.

The yardstick — a black-and-white imperial measure — recurs throughout their work. They’re pleased when I praise it. It’s like a signature; a meta-insertion. Louise agrees; Jane turns to her: “where’s Kubrick?” She pulls out a book. They spotted the yardstick in 1930s set-building images that Stanley Kubrick had purchased from a film archive. “There’s an almost forensic element,” Louise says, as we crowd around the book. “And also, what we loved about it, is that the two-yard measure is a redundant measure.” 

Another motif appears in I’d Walk With You But Not With Her. We study a work on the wall. A mollusc sits slap-bang in the foreground, its soft underside the colour of a cut-open tree. It looks as if it’s suckered on to the lens. We move to another image. There, we see instead its texture: a slime imprint across the centre.

We were drawn to its otherness, Jane tells me, and its duality. “Without wanting to bring twins into it . . . ” she trails off.

I tell them I’m also a twin and they beam and laugh. “Are you?” both ask in sequence, the “are” high-pitched, its own exclamation. I sense relief. We exchange experiences. “I love it when people come up to you,” Louise says, “and go . . . you’re not real identical twins.” They joke over each other. “The ownership someone feels,” Jane says, egging Louise on, “to reflect on who you are.”

The idea of being looked at is a charged idea as a woman — as a twin, doubly so. Their work holds that. It’s infused with duality: horror and beauty, quiet and catastrophe, looking versus being looked at. And, I suspect, split opinion . . . presumably they’re not always in agreement? “God no,” Jane says. They both laugh knowingly.

“We have quite heated debates,” Jane continues. “Cross-pollination is the word,” Louise adds.

I’m struck by how grounded and reasonable they are, little interested in art-world self-importance. Since their joint application for an MA at Goldsmiths in 1991, they have lived in London — Louise living on-and-off with Jane, who is based in east London with her partner and 15-year-old son (and Laika, who is named after the first dog to orbit the Earth).

In 2017, thanks to another joint application, they were appointed co-professors of fine art at Newcastle University. “We have separate students though,” Louise clarifies. “We don’t bombard them together, poor things, they’d be so outnumbered.” They enjoy teaching — “I think it’s really important to step out of the studio and have a conversation,” Louise says, “especially with the generation that’s coming up . . . that’s a privilege.” 

“But we’re not just so firmly entrenched in academia, if I can say that, because . . .” “Kill me,” Jane concisely finishes for her. “Kill me.” 

So come on, I say. Their last show in London was nearly a decade ago. Why’s it been so long? They make groaning sounds in acknowledgment. “I know, I know, my goodness,” Louise replies, “Why has it been so long?”

“I think it’s probably no bad thing . . . but it’s been wonderful to find we have actually had a great conversation with a great gallery.”

“Having two years of lockdown and having that pause,” reflects Jane, “I think maybe for me and Louise it made it clearer for us what really are the proper priorities, and maybe it isn’t about just being on this big old colonial impulse of the gallery world: usurping! conquering! building bigger! and better!” her voice crescendos in mock dramatics and Louise laughs.

“I guess we’re still the last of the indies,” Jane says. She looks at Louise, and they grin.

‘The Toxic Camera’, April 29-June 5, maureenpaley.com