Biography
1980-87. London/ Neo Naturist era
PAINTING
SHOP
News
PERFORMANCE
surf mama
contact

WILMA WORLD

Biography
1980-87. London/ Neo Naturist era
PAINTING
SHOP
News
PERFORMANCE
surf mama
contact

Women in Revolt! has finished at Tate Britain, now travelling to National Galleries of Scotland, See you there!

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Wilma Johnson was born in London in 1960, she spent the first three years of her life in Paris . She went to St Martins college of art in 1978 and got a first class degree in fine art. While she was there she founded the Neo Naturist performance art group with Christine and Jennifer Binnie and Grayson Perry . They appeared at venues including the Royal Opera House, Taboo and the Spanish Anarchy Centre, collaborating with artists including Derek Jarman, John Maybury, Andrew Logan, Leigh Bowery and Trojan, and michael Clark dance company.

In 1987 she ran away to Mexico to concentrate on her painting, following the fiesta and painting in her bedroom in the Posada margarita in Oaxaca, and spent a lot of time with artist and ‘Fridalito’ Arturo Garcia Bustos. He said she reminded him of Frida and tried to give her one of her huipiles to wear to a party, but it didn’t fit :((

She came back to London briefly then got maried and went to live on the Dingle peninsula where she had three children and painted in a huge studio on the western most tip of Ireland. During the ‘earth mother years’ her husband , the artist Nick Gammon caught lobster and crabs in Smerwick harbour while she grew chiles and tomatoes and made salsa back in the kitchen.

They moved to Biarritz, where she separated from her husband, became a surfer , set up the mamas Surf Club with the motto ‘Out of the kitchen and into the surf.’ She wrote the book Surf Mama while living in a delapidated villa nick named the Addams Family Mansion with her three children and a menagerie of dogs cats parakeets turtles and rabbits.

After the critically acclaimed Neo Naturist Retrospective at Studio Voltaire in 2016, she decided to come back to London and rejoin her tribe. Since then her paintings and the work of the Neo Naturists have been featured in shows including Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain and National Galleries of Scotland, Re/Sisters at the Barbican and Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool and the William Morris Gallery. They have performed at the Globe Theatre at AndrewLogan’s Alternative Miss World and gave the first ever nude lecture at Tate Britain last year.

Wilma now lives in Waterloo and has a studio at Proposition Studios in Bethnal Green.