Totally Cut: An Interview with Terry Wilson

 Terry Wilson. ‘The Gysin Level’ 2013. Paper with tape, ink and mixed media collage.
Dedication added September 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Luzius Martin.

By JAMES RILEY, March 12th, 2026

Terry Wilson (b. 1947) is a British artist and writer. He is best known for Here to Go: Planet 101 (1982), a book-length interview with Brion Gysin (1913-1986), a painter, writer and magician with whom Wilson had a long-standing personal and creative association. Wilson is also the author of ‘D’ Train (1985), Dreams of Green Base (1986), Perilous Passage (2005), and Days Lane (2009), four novels which extend the ‘cut-up’ methodology Gysin developed with William Burroughs during the 1960s. More recently, Wilson has been producing cut-ups en collage. These have been shown at the Gallery Ann Mazzotti in Basel and published in the collection Severed Due Stations (2024).

This year, selected works by Wilson will be shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris as part of  "Brion Gysin: The Last Museum." They will also be included in a further group exhibition at Ann Mazzotti alongside works by Gysin and Burroughs. Ahead of these shows, Wilson spoke to me in London about his creative process.

James Riley: When did you start producing collage works?

Terry Wilson: The first images came around 2010 or 2011. I had got Perilous Passage out of the way, finally, around 2004 or 2005. I had been held up because I realised it didn’t really have a satisfactory ending. So that’s how a trip to the Amazon to take Ayahuasca came about. Perilous Passage was a book of disparate, anomalous material. I think it’s the most experimental thing I’ve done, because I was trying to fit two or three strands together. As the full title suggests, it’s about “The Nervous System and the Universe In Other Words”. I was trying to mold these things into one book from rather disparate material.

Then, in 2009, I was invited to a conference in Paris about William Burroughs, “Naked Lunch at 50” and I still had a lot of extended material which I used, in essence, to exemplify a teaching method by Brion Gysin. I had thought Perilous Passage would be the last book, but the material prepared for the conference fed into another publication, Days Lane. And that, to me, was the end.

Around the same time, I moved back to London from Hampshire where I had been caring for my mother and creatively, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. Every book I’d written — from Dreams of Green Base (half of which was written before I met Brion, though terribly influenced by the cut-up technique) to Days Lane, had now come to its natural conclusion.

I thought I could just do nothing. But then I remembered having a conversation with Brion and saying that neither he nor William had really done the cut-up thing with images. Of course, Brion in his visual work was generally not working with cut-ups. He was a master calligrapher. The cut-ups were part of his so-called “strong black”, his “strong black magic”: the means by which he used to try and exorcise William. Brion was very ill when we talked about visual cut-ups. He only had a few months to live. It was a very emotional period. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it much, but he said to me: “Oh, you do it!”

I forgot about that for a while. But later I realised that neither he nor William ever said anything off the cuff. They never let a loose word out like that. So, after Days Lane was published, I thought “Well, my God yes!” – he was actually telling me what to do. So I began.

JR: Did you see cut-ups with images as different to doing cut-ups with text?

TW: With prose cut-ups, you cannot simply cut the whole thing up, present it to people and say, “see what you can make out of this!”. You have to edit. But with images, I realised you could do it totally. You could totally cut-up and arrange everything at random. Now, if I see any improvement I can make during the process, like adding a calligraphic line other or relevant material – a photograph, for example – then I’ll do that. So that then it becomes not so much a cut-up but a conventional collage, although ninety percent of it is cut-up. Even if there’s ten percent that isn’t cut-up, that means I’ll have to cut-up the whole thing again.

Terry Wilson. ‘BW/TW Hollywood BLVD 1965’ 2012. Paper with photographs and mixed media. Dedication by artist ‘for Bett’.
Courtesy of the artist and Luzius Martin.
 

JR: How do you choose “relevant material”.

TW: I think William says somewhere — perhaps in Nova Express — that it’s very difficult to know what is relevant and what is not. You make your relevant material yourself. What seems relevant at that moment is relevant. Anything can be relevant. It depends on your skill as an artist or writer.

JR: Judging by your work, relevance seems to be connected to personal material. You use a lot of personal, family photographs. There’s a lot of photographs of you.

TW: Yes, because so many of those photographs were taken by my father or mother on our trips to Australia and back.

JR: And that personal connection to the material is important?

TW: Yes — although it’s very difficult to talk about.

JR: When Burroughs and Gysin spoke about cut-ups, they often spoke about cutting-up canonical material - Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and the like, as if the process was an attack on the importance of a cultural institution.

TW: Yes, they started off with what they called “piss-poor material,” and then they got the notion, “what might happen if we cut up Shakespeare?” I went in the other direction. I find it fascinating to take the most uninteresting photographs — my father was not a particularly good photographer — but if you take hundreds of photographs, some will be pretty good. I would just take the most uninteresting photographs and make them the focus of a cut-up collage. To me, cutting up Eliot and Shakespeare is a bit like fishing in a bucket. You can’t go wrong. But by just taking anything, material that appears worthless, you accept responsibility for making it into something. And I think that’s one aspect of what an artist does.

JR: How do you put the images together? What do you work with?

TW: Oh, it's just scissors and paste. It's just very, very simple. It’s something that anybody could do.

JR: But they don't. Your images are complex: patterned and geometric.

TW: Yes, but the process is simple. You either choose a suitable image, or you make a collage, a very conventional collage of yourself, perhaps, by yourself. And then you simply just cut it up at random. I turn it around, so I don't look at all at what I'm cutting up. It's a blank page. I go from right to left because that was Gysin’s way. But mine always seem to go upwards rather than in the other direction. And so, you end up with a heap of confetti on the table. And then you take some glue, and you just choose the first one that comes along.

JR: Is that important to you that it happens very fast?

TW: Yes, I think speed is very important. One is not deliberating about this type of thing, not in the slightest way. With words, if you're writing a book, you have to deliberate to some extent. But with images, you can do it just like that. If I need a photograph, then I will find a suitable photograph, or I wouldn't find it. More likely it would just come to me. And were I then to add it to an existing image, the whole thing would have to be cut again. Sometimes that would work and sometimes you might just as well leave it alone, actually. I don't like the idea of something that's only partially cut up. When I started doing the images I wanted them to be totally cut.

Terry Wilson. ‘As Real As People Walking Away’ 2013. Paper with tape, photographs and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Luzius Martin.
 

JR: What does your material turn into? What's the typical outcome of the process?

TW: The outcome is what you see, of course, but the fact is, I was taught extensively by Brion. He wanted me to understand, to the extent of my capacity, what he was doing. And a central part of Gysin’s teaching was to produce tandra, that's a yogic term, but it relates to memory experiences and so-called memories which just knock out your own personal experience. Tandra makes you realize or appears to make you realize that you are nothing. You are nobody. At least, you are not what you think you are.

JR: Is it difficult to work with such personal material?

TW: No. Once you start using the blades on something everything becomes routine. It is tremendously exciting, though. I mean, the thing with tandra is that you get high.

I just know that when I was doing it, when I knew I had an image, then it was exhilarating. When I found a photograph that I really wanted, I couldn’t get back here fast enough to start cutting it up. Quite a lot of the time I would be getting nowhere and then finally you look and you see something. You know what you want before you do it, and then suddenly – like a hit in the face – you produce some totally different thing. Now, that makes me high. Yes, tandra makes you high. That's what it is. Because you suddenly feel free from your personality.

JR: Is it as a form of time travelling?

TW: Absolutely. With the cut-up, that's what you're doing. You're cutting up time and as such, you’re disrupting what you think of your own personality. It’s a process which can be rather devastating on occasions. But somehow, you know, I’ve I managed to get through. I'm still alive at nearly 80.

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Brion Gysin: The Last Museum is at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris from 10 April to 12 July 2026.

Gallery Ann Mazzotti, Basel, will be showing work by Wilson, Burroughs and Gysin from 9 May to 20 June 2026. Details of their previous Wilson exhibition can be found here.

Severed Due Stations (2024) is available now from Moloko Print.

With thanks to Luzius Martin.