Interruption: Imaging Sense of Place

What happens when human and non-human bodies interrupt one another? Forces clash and they shape or re-shape parts of our experienced world. Williams’s work explores the moment when objects, plants, animals and people interact in a complex dance, and cause an interruption in the relationship that existed before.

Within the artist’s constellation of ideas, an interruption means a body taking a position, often beyond language, but always through a relationship of affect on the body. Capturing this moment in a work of art can give the artist – and the viewer – access to the lived and sensed quality of places. Sometimes the work stirs a memory of something familiar, and sometimes a sense of encountering something previously unknown.

In this showcase we feature unique works, including paintings and sketches, alongside editioned prints which were made in collaboration with the David Krut Workshop. This selection of works presents a progression of the artist’s practice over a period of three years.

Williams said the following about his work: “My paintings and prints are sketches for each other. Like sketches, they capture aspects of what I am working with, and elements are transposed, and shifted, from the one into the other.”

In Interruption: Imaging sense of place we see a slowly evolving subject matter driven by Williams’s mark-making, by his layering of forms and lines, vibrant - sometimes jarring - colours, and translucent and opaque application of colour. We see a slippage between abstraction and figuration as the artist grapples with his task of imaging a sense of place not necessarily seen.

Williams’s work, removed from their place of origin in Johannesburg and curated for Montebello Design Centre, tells a story about experiencing moments in the world, and through the image, opening a moment felt.