Monthly Archives: February 2025

Topopoetic resonances in the work of Lois Williams: a speculative essay. (Part one)

Much of my work deals with the human condition; the passage of time, mortality, vulnerability; universal themes in other words. Although the materials and imagery may be seen as arising from a particular culture or a way of life, this is only the beginning. 

Lois Williams (in Bala 1999: p. 144) 

A note to the reader

All images used in this essay are kindly provided by the artist, are copyright, and should not be reproduced without her permission. A bibliography will be provided at the end of the essay.

Preface

The artist Lois Williams’ work, first shown in the 1975 Northern Young Contemporaries, has since been exhibited in venues in her native Wales, across the UK, and internationally. This essay draws on the thinking of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell to ponder the geopoetic resonances of that work, its experiential relationship to our being in place. To avoid raising expectations that this essay will not meet, I’ll begin by setting out what’s not attempted here. 

I do not discuss Williams’ work in relation to other visual art, in terms of movements such as Minimalism or Arte Povera, or from a particular art critical or theoretical viewpoint. I’m not Welsh and respect Gwyn Alf Williams’ claim that: ‘Wales is a process. Wales is an artefact which the Welsh produce. The Welsh make and remake Wales day by day, year by year, generation by generation, if they want to’ (quoted Bala 1999: 6). As a result, I’ve made no attempt to locate Williams’ work in relation to current cultural debates in Wales. However, I believe that the identity of individuals and communities is, to a greater or lesser degree, formed as much by the stories told about them as those they tell about themselves. This essay would not have been written otherwise. 

My focus here is on suggesting correspondences between the thinking of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell and resonances I find in Williams’ work, with its emphasis on a haptic sculptural “language”. 

Introduction

Slip

Slip.

Left: taken while the artist was making the work in a small attic studio space in Sheffield. Right: taken when the work was shown at Oriel Mostyn Gallery Llandudno in the exhibition Lois Williams: From the Interior.

The art historian Philip Rawson distinguishes between the subject of a drawing and its topic. The subject is what a work literally presents, often what’s named or implied by its title. In the case of Lois Williams’ 1986 work Slip, her subject is the light undergarment worn next to the skin by women. Traditionally a slip provided extra warmth, protected the body from chafing, provided an additional degree of modesty if a dress was deemed too revealing, or reduced the need for cleaning a dress which was not washable by protected it from perspiration and other body fluids. By contrast, any attempt to identify the topic of Williams’ Slip would require, at the very least, a detailed account of its particular qualities and resonances in relation to its subject, an account that, ideally, warrants both considerable attention to detail and a poet’s sensitivity to language.    

Such an account might start by noting that Slip is made of rough sacking, a coarse-grained, utilitarian material with a particular smell and cultural resonances that include notions of penance, as implicit in the phrase “sackcloth and ashes”. There’s also Slip’s size, weightiness, and elaborate yet unfished nature. All qualities that put in question any taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between a slip as a utilitarian object and the female body. Qualities that might draw us into a reverie grounded in careful attention both to the particular qualities of this unique work and the associations that arise from them. Qualities able, as the poet Paula Meehan writes in response to W H Auden’s claim that poetry makes nothing happen, to stop ‘something happening’ in the sense of stopping ‘time’, taking ‘our breath away” Qualities, she adds, that may act “like negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’. (2016:19) 

There are several points I want to stress in relation to this. First and foremost, there’s the fundamentally lyrical nature of Williams’ work, as that term is used of poetry. From this it follows that our experiencing the felt moment of engagement that’s engendered by a work such as Slip, itself the consequence of our navigating the productive tensions between its subject and topic, the title and material object, are always particular to that work itself. So, while objects that are part of Williams’ Follow, as a Shadow (2014) are made from the same sacking as Slip, the play between that work’s components – nominally a sheep’s skull and leg which reference flesh and bone – and the sacking they’re made from, evoke resonances particular to that work. These will be quite distinct from those evoked by the sacking of Slip. In short, each work asks that we attend carefully to the relationship between its title, all its elements, and the various resonances they evoke for the viewer. Consequently, when Tony Curtis refers to the teapot in Red (1995) as ‘pouring blood’, Williams points out that the piece’s title is Red, a word with ‘many associations’ (in Curtis 2000: 233).

I’ve begun with the creative tension between subject and topic in part because the topic of this essay is not identical with the subject indicated by its title. Instead it lies at the confluence of three concerns: with the resonances of particular qualities in Williams’ work; with how we engage with the places we find ourselves in, and with what the topopoetic reflections of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell may suggest about the first two concerns.  

An Afterthought concerning ‘Thinking art and/as magic together, tentatively (again)’?

As often happens, a topic that’s preoccupied me for a while continues to be pondered somewhere other than in consciousness. I have been reading two very different books – Paul Hammond’s Constellations of Miro, Breton (City Lights Press, 2000) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018), which collects together all her writing on that place, the six main books and a number of short stories. Having done so, it now occurs to me that I need to add an afterthought to my earlier posts about art and magic.

In a section entitled The Wish-Landscape of This Everywhere, Hammond discusses the relationship between Breton’s book L’Art magique (1957) and his texts to accompany (‘illustrate’) Miro’s set of paintings known as Constellations. To do so he sets out Breton’s understanding of magic as it relates to Surrealism and the history of art in which he locates it, which in many respects draws heavily on Freud. Reading Hammond’s account, it seemed to me that Breton (and Freud) ultimately don’t offer us an understanding of the relationship between art and magic that breaks with the dominant culture that is now in the process of not only destroying itself but much of the web of more-than-human life along with it. A reading of Le Guin’s collected Earthsea material, on the other hand, does seem to me to do just that, both by drawing on her own concerns as a feminist and by reaching back to, and re-imagining, past understandings from non-Western cultures and how they might be enacted in everyday life.

It’s very possible that the particular reading of Le Guin I’ve come away with is coloured by having recently worked my way through the philosopher Eureka Santos Aesthetics of Care, an extension of her previous thinking in her Everyday Aesthetics in relation to a possible project. I read the second three books, and some of the short stories, as a critique and correction of the ‘masculinist’ assumptions that result in over-investment in the kinds of power enacted as ‘art magic’ (Le Guin’s term) in the first three books. I will not insult the subtlety, pathos and humour of Le Guin’s powerful storytelling by trying to paraphrase it in a “message”. However, while if I were to begin to address the notion of thinking art and/as magic together again, I would come to broadly the same conclusions, I would have save myself (and the reader) a good deal of time and unnecessary meandering by drawing directly on Le Guin’s Earthsea narratives.

J. D. Vance gives the game away?

Rebecca Solnit has drawn attention to J. D. Vance saying that: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” 

Setting aside all that’s ridiculous in that statement in terms of the inference that Thunberg threatened US democracy, not to mention the imbalance between the two figures, I think it suggests an interesting truth. Vince’s strange comparison seems to me to imply a wholly disproportionate fear of a young woman – Thunberg is still only 22 – whose concern for the global environment on which her and all our futures depend, he characterises as “scolding”. Scolding is, of course, a word most frequently used to refer to a female authority figure, most usually a mother, in relation to a child that has repeatedly done something stupid, inappropriate or wrong. Doesn’t his statement suggest a very real fear of, and resentment about, a woman telling truth to power and, behind that, a childish fear of, and resentment about, anyone who draws attention to his appallingly “bad behaviour”?

Thank you, Rebecca Solnit

I find it very hard to write anything for this blog that feels worthwhile at present. This is in some small part due to the complexities of our current family circumstances but, much more centrally, as a result of what is happening in the wider world. I’m probably not alone in feeling that recent events in Gaza, Ukraine and the results of the election in the USA signify a slide back towards a world dominated by gross egoism, greed, bigotry, religiously-justified hatred, and much else that it might be hoped we, as a species, were slowly moving away from. And of course the increasingly rapid destruction of a habitable world, not only for the human population but, in all probability, for all living things.

I am in consequence very grateful to those who, like Rebecca Solnit, are continuing to do what I don’t feel able to do; to think and feel clearly and to act accordingly See, then, Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergence.