Sarah Williams: New Paintings

Sarah Williams paints quiet and solitary spaces - staircases, waiting rooms, corridors and car parks - those banal interstitial spaces we move through every day and rarely pause to consider or appreciate.

Her locales have a haunting emptiness and anonymity about them, and yet an uneasy familiarity that allows the viewer to project themselves into each of these scenes, alone. The impact of each image is not solely schematic however, but relies on the sensitive treatment of paint.

Williams places an emphasis on the physical process of painting by dragging thick, generous swathes of paint over contrasting grounds. Williams’ mode of painting draws attention to the materiality of the paint itself, and to some extent its weight and substance supersedes the image in her work. Her cakes of pigment are substantial and concrete yet with extremely subtle nuances in colour and lustre. Williams liberally applies layer upon layer of paint; each one mixed with the previous application upon the canvas or obscured by the following action. Residues of erstwhile paintings lie dormant beneath the finished work.

As the child of missionaries based in the Philippines, Williams spent her first twelve years travelling between Manila and New Zealand, a period during which she lived with her family in thirteen different houses. Having completed her BFA degree at Elam school of Fine Arts in 2005, this year, Williams has undertaken a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Auckland.

Event listed by Seed23

View their other events or contact promoter