Capturing a space and a time. Open Studio July 2023

Did you see the paint on the walls of the bus shelter at the top of Union Street a few weeks ago? Did it try your patience, or did you see it as an exciting new visual language out on the street? If you visit Kathy Williams’ studio, you’ll learn what it was all about, and come out with an insight into new ways of seeing. Kathy is fresh from her residency in the display window at the former Elizabeth Pack store, now the Department arts hub, Ryde. There she embraced the bus stop outside with its transparent sides and ever-moving backdrop of people, vehicles and urban space, as an extension of her work in the window studio. She is now in a period of assessment and experimentation. The residency has added new dimensions to her ongoing contemplation of space and time. Where will it take her next? She plans to make models based on her window-studio work, and perhaps take some of the developing ideas to different sites, moving along with what she has made, even as she makes it.

Kathy is a painter, but not a painter of pictures. “I don’t ever feel I have an image to paint” she explains. The picture isn’t what she is interested in pursuing, though many of her explorations have resulted in very beautiful series of artworks. Indeed, all of Kathy’s work is intriguing and multifaceted. Kathy’s paintings are about the nature of paint and painting; “paint can say more than you put into it. We use paint because of what it can do” she says. There is always an element of the uncontrolled, and therefore the unknown, involved. Kathy sees painting as a mirror for every aspect of life, from parenting to gardening. “You have some knowledge of what you want to do, how you want things to be, but there is always an element of the uncontrollable. The paint is like that. It talks back to you about what you are doing”. Kathy realises that ultimately, the painter has to allow paint to do what paint does. It seems to me that Kathy approaches not just the paint, but also the painting surface in the same spirit. In several 3D paintings in which painted paper is rolled into a cylinder and adhered to the surface, Kathy is mulling whether to tear away the paper cylinders so that the paper will leave behind traces of itself; allowing the paper to do what paper does, I suppose.

Not a figurative painter, Kathy does see figures in her completed artworks. In knobbed lines of colour in two works, Kathy sees the vertebrae of a spine in X ray. In the same two paintings, I saw a landscape, and a telegraph pole so vividly I wanted to climb up its rungs, for these monochrome paintings, simple as they are, have great power. X-rays too bring the inside out, in their own way.

The theme of inside outside is essentially a coming together of opposites. The bus shelter was decorated with artworks from inside the window studio. The windows and the artworks in the bus shelter reflected the buildings of the street, and their own windows, and the people in the bus shelter sat sculpture-like within, becoming part of the art in their turn – layer upon layer looking out looking in. Kathy showed me the pile of transparent plastic sheets which had been painted at the Department and the bus stop outside, both by Kathy herself and by passers-by who she had encouraged to express themselves in abstract marks. Some of these sheets she rolled into a cylinder. An arch painted on flat plastic became a ribbon bow shape, taking on new aspects with new spaces in between as she moved it around. She has set these cylinders on turntables and she showed me a video of one she had made at home while the television was on in the background. As I watched the video of the circulating plastic cylinder, I was transported to a moment in time and place in my own life - watching a snatch of Christian Marclay’s movie, The Clock in Metz several years ago. The Clock consists of 24 hours of clips from old movies referencing the time in sequence. Kathy’s concept was different, but here too video (the tv) was informing what was going on in real-world time and space, becoming part of both the artwork turning on the turntable and the new artwork being made – the video of it. Snatches of speech and music from the television dictated the entire mood and meaning of the piece in that particular moment. In a different location, the language of the marks would take on a quite different meaning. Kathy expects to show some of these turntables during the Ryde Studios Art Trail. She is interested in the way the transparent drawing, when rolled, “moulds into itself” and the shapes change as they move around, interlinking with one another. She wants to build up these transparent shapes, and is planning some 3D sculptures based on them, and perhaps to make a site-specific, event-specific piece especially for the space at Riboleau Studios.

Kathy plays with opposites, making a flat painting on an uneven surface, for example. She has run workshops at the studio, teaching both the elderly and children simultaneously – people at opposite ends of the age spectrum who turned out to have a great deal in common and had enormous fun together. Previous projects have included giant still lifes of found objects, in which the space created on the canvas is as important as the marks made, as well as meditative drawings in which she seeks to capture a moment in time. She has explored relief painting and making paintings 3D – creating real space in a painting.

As I wandered the studio space, I shied away from taking a photo of one little framed 3D artwork backed by a mirror, not wishing my own mugshot to appear in the photo as part of the artwork – yet another looking inside/looking outside piece.

I asked Kathy what she would like people to be thinking as they come away from a visit to her studio. She was ready with her response: “I’ve got this space, perhaps I could let Kathy do a site-specific artwork for it”.

I was so excited by the conversations Kathy’s artworks had sparked off as we talked together in her studio that I forgot to go scrumping for apples and blackberries in Riboleau’s lovely semi-wild garden graced by a tall and elegant protected tulip tree. When you visit, don’t forget to take a bag with you. I’m sure they won’t mind . - R.L