Painting on linen over a luminous umber base, Wilkin draws from a wide range of sources: vintage erotica, contemporary fashion magazines, merchandising, and music videos. Her motifs are superimposed, each painting acting as a visual portmanteau of eros and power. Oftentimes three or four distinct images are overlaid to compound their narrative qualities: dialogues slipping in and out in a Rorschach-like test of the viewer's own subliminal inclinations. Carnal and sinuous, Wilkin's paintings are concerned with the tensions between public and private expression, restraint and control, and desire within traditional hierarchies of status.
A core reference for the artist is James Joyce's 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake, in particular his nonlinear narration and radical reworking of language. In Joyce's hands words are spliced and combined in an allusive and delirious manner. Through her own visual layering, Wilkin likewise encourages a decomposition between the signifier and the signified. She creates a sultry world in which tangible motifs like gripped hands, harnesses, ties or belts dissolve into visual pattern expressed with loose brush strokes. Wilkin also works within polyptych presentations, interested in film animation and Eadweard Muybridge's animal studies, where narrative unfolds between small shifts in repeated movement.
In her first solo exhibition with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Ad Libidinum, fashion and clothing are primary subjects, acting as symbols of eroticism, and public and private expression, as well as that of repression or constriction. The artist considers how clothes express an individual's identity, uniform-like as they conceal or contain. For Wilkin, clothing can be bondage, or it can be generative and shapeshifting, as it offers the figure a new material form.