Kathy Williams graduated from the painting department at the Royal College of Art, London, in the late 1990’s, and embarked on a course of research that questioned the role and place art has within society. She co-created exhibitions held in flats and encouraged members of the public to work with artists to create artworks for London exhibitions, work which culminated in a commission to create a socially engaged art piece for the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

In terms of painting, Kathy felt she had absolutely pushed to its limits ways in which the illusion of space could be created on a canvas, and she had also run out of faith with questions asking ‘what to paint’. Kathy had painted consistently for 10 years but had by now fallen out of love with the intrinsic relationship painting had to image.

Part choice and partly forced upon her, Kathy stopped making for what turned out to be 20 years.

Kathy returned to painting several years ago and, through questioning and dogged persistence has reached a place where strands link together and connect to ideas she has always been concerned with. That of process, materiality, space, public perception, accessibility, and pushing limitations. Each piece of work that she creates has its place in her long line of enquiry about how paint can be used and expanded within the field of contemporary art.

Ideas of control and allowing natural behaviours to occur are central themes to her work. Her work mirrors how we interact with others, with family, friends, and events as we make sense of what happens and play a give-and-take game to understand the world around us yet also try to exert some control over events to keep some kind of sanity.

Pushing the boundaries of her knowledge, Kathy has begun to create shapes and forms of size that can fill and react to specific spaces. We can experience them as full, life-sized statements of being, walk in and around the marks and choose our own spaces from which we prefer to experience them. These are installations that reflect a moment of time, of specific (unplanned) decisions made with of-the-moment external influencing factors. If a particular installation occurred on a different day, in a different place, the arrangements would be different. Elements of each piece can be re-assembled - even re-formed – as we review, edit, learn, grow, or change, as time passes by.

Kathy likes to shift parts of the work as it exists, bringing into question ideas we have about being sure the decisions we make are correct, having the courage to change our minds when decisions have been made and highlighting our linear activities of growth and learning itself. Although terrifying, the action of Kathy installing work, or reacting to the environment and time itself, puts her in a place of extreme vulnerability….what if it does not work out? What if the plans she has, the work she will make does not work out? The final work always carries with it the uncertainties, the unknowing of exactly how it will work once completed. It is not a conceived piece of perfection, planned to the minute of detail and re created in a place, but instead a cosmos of knowings, of trust and a willingness to interact with materials to create statements universal to all.