A DEEPER RECESS 010: an interview with Jane & Louise Wilson
We speak to artist duo Jane & Louise Wilson from their newest exhibition at London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE
28 July 2025
Welcome to the tenth edition of A Deeper Recess. Following on from interviews with Mike Nelson & Jeremy Deller, we now bring you an interview with the Jane & Louise Wilson.
These interviews are designed to be timeless & useful resources to more deeply understand a creative practice & journey beyond a current exhibition, building, or project. While they look simple as transcripts, they still take a lot of time to put together, so the support of subscribers is invaluable & appreciated.
An interview with Jane & Louise Wilson
Exhibition details available at: www.londonmithraeum.com/bloomberg-space
Jane and Louise Wilson are identical twin sisters, creating film and installation artwork together for over three decades. Born in 1967, Jane took her BA at Duncan Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, while Louise stayed in their home city of Newcastle Upon Tyne and took her BA at Newcastle Polytechnic – though they submitted identical final degree shows, forcing the two institutions to collaborate on assessment.
This play with duality and diptych continues through their practice since, establishing an internationally recognised practice frequently employing two or more screens in immersive situations. Architecture and man-made place has been central to their works and research, with particular interest in post-war constructions and how such places decay, both in physical terms and in social memory.
Their latest project, Performance of Entrapment, has opened at London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in London, a gallery within the Norman Foster-designed Bloomberg HQ which sits directly above the publicly-accessible Temple of Mithras, a Roman temple now deep under the ground level of the City of London. The Wilson Sisters contrast the Londinium temple with the Ise Jingū shrine in Japan, a place they visited on residency. With two main shrines in the complex, the Jingū shrine has a unique strategy of preservation, the buildings being completely rebuilt every twenty years using construction knowledge passed down through practice over centuries.
Our interview covered the Bloomberg project, but also reached back into the artist’s career to discuss this new project in relation to key concerns of their practice. This touches on work they have carried out from Orford Ness, Suffolk, through to Pripyat and the fallout of Chernobyl and a Soviet-era space rocket site. We also talk about two places the pair have lived, Berlin during the post-reunification period, and their home city of Newcastle and the surrounding area – an area they have considered in many works, and where they currently teach as joint Professors of Fine Art at Newcastle University.
We start by finding out about this project and how it came to be: