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.

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.