Background context
In 1990 Michael Tooby described Lois Williams’ state of being as ‘“in-between”, a reference to her travelling weekly between ‘rural Wales (family home and powerful influence) and urban Sheffield (place of work and working context)’, but also to her identification with ‘a loose collection of artists, curators, and colleagues in other walks of life who pursue other goals’, rather than to any easily identified community (1990: 72). Williams grew up on a farm in Cefn Meiriadog, near St Aspaph in North Wales, where she still lives. Iwan Bala notes that her parents are: ‘Welsh-speaking, yet whilst understanding every word, she herself no longer speaks the language’. (1999: 138) Williams herself, however, explains this aspect of her family background as follows.
My father came from a Welsh speaking farming family in the Vale of Clwyd. My mother didn’t. She was born in Ashton in Makerfield, Lancashire, and did not come to live in Wales until she was eleven. Both her parents however were from Wales: her father was from Rhewl Mostyn and her mother from Coedpoeth, Wrexham. Her father was a coal miner and went to Lancashire for work as did many from this area. My grandmother at the age sixteen was a tailoress and worked for a well-known clothing company in Wigan (she had the most beautiful hand stitching skills). She had been sent to Ashton after her mother died when she was eight to be looked after by an Aunt and Uncle. They were also from Wales. The family lived on Bolton Rd, Ashton, in Makerfield which was very much known as a strong Welsh community with several Welsh Chapels and cultural events regularly happening such as Eisteddfodau. The crucial difference was that my mother’s family spoke English in the home unlike my father’s family. Sometimes it was a mix of each with an understanding of both. But Welsh was really my mother’s second language.
As a small child I spoke just Welsh until I went to school but then our predominant language in the home became English but Welsh always there, on the radio, TV, newspapers, background conversation, Chapel, Ysgol Sul (Sunday School) and cultural events. (Email to the author, 21.04.2024)
I have quoted Williams in full here because it was from this complex but, in a Welsh context, not untypical family background that she moved elsewhere, first to study and then to earn a living. She would later teach for many years in Sheffield, while simultaneously making art work at home in Wales and in a variety of studios in Yorkshire. Williams’ acknowledgement of the subtle yet complex differences in the interweave of personal and economic historical conditions that formed her immediate family imply an equally nuanced sense of her own identity, something Tooby confirms when he references her “Welshness” as being related to further complicating cultural signifiers: ‘farming, Celtic yet Methodist, trapped between suburban and rural’. (Tooby 1995: 25). In addition to her socio-linguistic background, Williams work has also been informed by extensive knowledge of art practices, particularly those of women, by feminist writing, and by overseas travel, but equally by life-long experience of the daily activities of rural women in the context of agricultural work and by the local narratives associated with it.
In addition to numerous exhibitions in Wales, her cultural engagements there have included an Artist’s Residency at Ynys Enlli (Bardey Island), participation in Cyfuniad, Barmouth, and working as Consulting Artist on the refurbishment of the Oriel Mostyn Art Gallery, Llandudno, between 2006 to 2010. She has exhibited internationally and has also taken part in the SANSA International Artists Workshops in Kumasi, Ghana, and in projects in Tbilisi, Georgia, and at Art Villa Garikula, also in Georgia. It’s worth noting that her work has frequently appeared in thematic group exhibitions, including many focused on the work of women, most recently If not now, when? Generations of women in sculpture in Britain 1960-2022.
Why topopoetics?
Tim Cresswell claims that poetry is one of the ways in which:
… we stop and wonder at the specificity of the way things appear to us in place. Poetry involves being attentive to things and the ways in which they are gathered. Poetry is an ‘encounter with the world’. (2015: 39)
The Greek term poiēsis refers to making something that’s not existed before and, significantly, does not attach that act to any specific practice. Tópos refers to place.
What follows here is a speculative use of Cresswell’s topopoetics to explore, rather than attempt to “explain”, Williams’ sculptural work. I have also had in mind the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub’s suggestion that ‘art is based on the immanent inadequacy of its means’, a ‘binding inadequacy’ that ensures ‘it is close to life’. (1990: 132) If taking guidance from poets to reflect on Williams’ work appears idiosyncratic, I would argue that poets are best placed to put into words the nuances that link creative work to place. I’d also point to Williams’ own love of poetry and to David Alston’s reference to her work as a ‘poetic enterprise’ (2000: 6-7). However, while Williams exercises great care in choosing the titles of her work, she is of course first and foremost a maker of physical objects and assemblages, not of poems. Consequently it’s important to keep in mind that, in the final analysis, her work has ‘the penurious privilege of visual art, of being able to evoke many meanings without being pinned down by the specificities of words’. (Solnit 2014: 54)
In the catalogue of the exhibition Artisterium 7, held in Tbilisi in 2014, Magda Guruli says of Williams’ Follow, as a Shadow that her concerns are with ‘matters of identity and memory and their experience within everyday life’ and links this to our accumulating everyday objects that serve as an aspect of ‘the struggle against unfulfillment, loss and death’ (2014: 104). (An aspect of her work that might usefully be explored in relation to the poet John Burnside’s preoccupation with ‘the entirety of quotidian life’. Including ‘the commonplaces of “the dailiness of life” in his The Musical of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021: 436). Something that, for reasons of length, I can’t attempt here). Over and against references to poetry it’s important to give due weight to what Williams’ refers to as the ‘sense of my hands on the work’ and ‘of routine’ (in Curtis 2000: 223 & 225), particularly as this relates to women’s working lives. Also her ‘interest in developing work slowly often over a period of years and living with it’ and the importance of qualities she admires in Agnes Martin: ‘the silence of the works, their solitude, subtlety and self-containment’, (in Dudley 2021: 333-334). In particular because, as she has said: ‘a lot of my work is about standing silent’ (ibid.: 232). (Standing Silent is also the title of a work from 1994).
Standing Silent (1994)
The topopoetic significance of Tooby’s observation about “in-between-ness” relates to a paradox. On one hand there is Williams’ life-long commitment to articulating qualities inherent in, or related to her experience of, a particular place and way of life in rural Welsh. On the other the fact that this is a body of work only made possible by creative means developed and honed through engagement with an urban-based arts culture and via international dialogue fostered by travel. I would tentatively relate this creative paradox regarding a cultural “placing” both to Edward S. Casey’s insistence that: ‘If a position is a fixed posit of an established culture, a place, despite its frequently settled appearance, is an essay in experimental living with in a changing culture’ (1993: 31), and to Doreen Massey’s suggestion that we might ‘imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’. (2005: 9)
Ways of “being-in-place”
… as Agnes Martin pithily put it: ‘the response to art is the real art field’. The ‘work’
of art is not the object or event but the experience engendered within the mind of the artist and viewer.
Jacquelynn Baas (2015: 230)
Tim Cresswell has identified the different ways in which four collections of poems with which he is particularly concerned internalise and then re-exteriorize a sense of place, processes that I take here as suggestive of resonances within Williams’ work. He also reminds us that: ‘Places are not just locations but rich gatherings of things, practices and meanings. Places are then, as… Yi-Fu Tuan has suggested, centres of meaning and fields of care’ (2015: 10), an observation I see as pertinent to Williams’ work as it relates to place and belonging.
Cresswell reads Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III as the work of a woman who was both in and out of place; as involving a sense of ‘strangeness at home and homeseeking when away’, necessitating: ‘a search for knowledge of place’ that he characterises as: ‘the distanced search of a rootless, homeless anthropologist. Or geographer’ (2015: 92). His topopoetic distinctions are rooted, however, in a desire to clarify his own topopoetics, not to lay down fixed categories. It follows, then, that his reading of Geography III will only be obliquely pertinent to Bishop’s lyric poem The Fish; the final lines of which Mark Doty describes as generated by her giving herself over ‘to experiencing an object’ in a way that: ’leads to an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action’. (2010: 23) I’ll return to this observation later in relation to Williams’ work.
Cresswell goes on to read John Burnside’s The Asylum Dance as focused by a concern with ‘the nature of dwelling – of being-in-the-world through a focus on the liminal and the in-between’. A concern that is more ambiguously located with regard to issues of care and an in-betweenness that has the potential to generate lyric poetry. One I believe shares certain elements with the qualities Tooby attributes to Williams. Particularly in that Cresswell explores Burnside’s view that it is such in-betweenness that, ‘in an ever-changing processural way’ enables the formation of ‘identity and dwelling’, understood as much as spaces of becoming as of being (2015: 117-118). The particular consequences of this in-betweenness are amplified by Cresswell’s reading of Don McKay’s Strike/Slip, seen as a phenomenology of stone and an acknowledgment of the radical otherness, of the wildness in the world. Extending this thought into a discussion of defamiliarization, Cresswell sees McKay as showing how a poet comes to be: ‘implicated in the process of dwelling by his or her transformation of worlds into words which fail’. He goes on to add that McKay shows how, through a ‘phenomenological attention to the natural world’, both that and the cultural world ‘still matter’, so that the poet’s twisting language ‘for all it’s worth’ makes ‘evident the faulty seam that connects and separates us to and from the world’ (2015: 127-128 & 143). Again I want to suggest that the qualities of transformative attention by which worlds are reimagined, in Williams’ case through the hand-working of humble materials, are directly pertinent.
Cresswell then goes on to explore the paradoxically illuminating inadequacy within a lyric poet’s work as it appears inJorie Graham’s Place. He reads Place as concerned with a topopoetics of friction that: ‘grapples with specificity’ so that the poet finally comes to see that a ‘moment is a place’ (2015: 156). An insight concerned with what occurs when universals or abstractions make ‘contact with the earth – with life lived’, resulting in a friction that reflects ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’. (ibid: 172) One concerned with moments when “something catches”; something which is, ‘in the end, all we have to hold on to and care for’. (ibid. 169) Once again, I see these observations as illuminating in relation to Williams’ work, in particular regarding her concern with the ambivalent “concretisation” of memory through objects made by hand.
Dwelling-as-preservation
[Williams’] husbandry parallels the agricultural cycle of labour, tending, storing up, an unsentimental caring for the farm stock, the hard labour of the farm, which respects no hours, the retention and reuse in farm work of materials kept in rusting tins in old barns, the improvisation born of experience.
David Alston (2000: 06)
In a recent book chapter Cresswell reads Lorine Niedecker’s collection Paean To Place as created as a consequence of a life immersed in ‘the work of “preservation”’, of the ‘maintenance’ of a particular place; work that: ‘involves continual repetitive care’ (2020: 174). A body of poetry that he sees, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s feminist rethinking of Heidegger’s “dwelling”, as a substantive qualification of that philosopher’s tacitly masculinist bias. One that also reminds him that, whatever our relationship to place, it will always remain to a degree ‘liquid and uncertain’, a restating of Casey’s and Massey’s observations above. Consequently, Cresswell believes that for Niedecker:
Security is always temporary’ and that, unlike the implication in most readings of Heidegger’s work, there can be no assumption of a ‘monumental harmony of dwelling in the forest soil but something altogether more fragile that requires constant labour’ (ibid. 2020: 176 & 181).
I suggest that these observations chime with resonances in Williams’ work as replete not only with evocations of the ambivalence in dwelling-as-preservation fundamental to ‘the effort of place-making’, (ibid: 184) but also signalling relevance well beyond notions of “women’s work” or “housework”.
A core aspect of Williams’ art is its evocation of qualities of touch. While she ‘never learned to weave “properly”’, she found similar ‘ways of working with materials’ so as “to convey a sense of presence, an idea, a fear, a response to something…”’ (Dudley 2020: 178). Her emphasis on the hand-made, the haptic, has been central from the start and, as such, has created and deepened a resonant sense of the “near-at-hand” that “speaks” directly of dwelling-as-preservation. This engagement is clarified, and its implications deepened, by her observing:
I was brought up in a home where you used your hands a lot: making things, painting, repairing, darning, manipulating and exploring raw materials. I was always surrounded by lots of objects and ‘stuff’. My grandmother had extraordinary needlework skills and a very delicate touch: everything was hand sewn, no machine, tiny stitches, drawn thread, no colour. She also liked unravelling things. Looking back my use and choice of materials are obviously informed by those experiences and processes. (in Dudley 2020: 179)
Her last point echoes Cresswell’s reading of Niedecker, a reminder that dwelling-as-maintenance is inseparable from the interdependent processes of both “preserving” and “unravelling”. Here “unravelling” suggests transformations predicated on pulling or falling apart, whether the result of human or more-than-human agency. The potential instability in this dynamic is manifest in much of Williams’ work, from White Box Arc (1985) through A Reconstructed Thing (1994) and The Blue Bow (2000), to the piece exhibited with the title From a distance (2011), a title she’s no longer happy with.
White Box Arc (1985)
A Reconstructed Thing (1994)
The Blue Bow (2000)
David Alston comments that in Williams’ work: ‘repetitive processing as by a minimalist meets the like-minded processing of the rag-rug maker of two generations or more ago, making strips, threading, knotting in a “useful” spare time activity’. The reference is to Williams’ “carpet” works such as Sea of a Thousand Creases (1981) and Boxed Sea (1982), madefrom prepared strips of newspaper woven together. He concludes by suggesting that, in Williams’ work: ‘Economy of means meets mean economy’. (2000: 5) A curiously-phrased observation that I see as equally applicable to the routine nature of much farming activity, to the work Williams continued to participate in when in Wales by helping out on her parents’ farm. While the above suggests important aspects of Williams’ work’s relationship to rural dwelling-as-preservation, I see her involvement in “maintenance” of another kind as equally significant.
Boxed Sea (1982)
Lisa Baraitser points out that: ‘Care is an arduous temporal practice that entails the maintenance of relations with ourselves and others …’ (2017: 54), something that is clearly evident in teaching children. Williams has spent a working lifetime, day in and day out, as an art teacher in a suburban comprehensive school. Work that, however creatively undertaken, involves repeated routine acts of care and attention that may vary little from year to year. While her work rarely explicitly references her teaching, The Simplest Aid to Looking at Wales (1985) does so directly. She describes this as developed from ‘a horn book, a device we used to use for teaching children the alphabet’ (in Curtis 2000: 227). I want to suggest, then, that the implications of this work extend what Cresswell has to say about dwelling-as-maintenance. Williams’ employment of often extremely repetitious acts of making, clearly foregrounded in the resulting objects, signals something of Baraitser’s notion that: ‘Maintenance … is the temporal dimension of care’ (2017: 53). I also stress this to remind the reader that the resonances of Williams’ work are not captured by any one of Cresswell’s topopoetic readings, which is perhaps only to restate in another way Michael Toby’s view of Williams as placed ‘in-between’.
The Simplest Aid to Looking at Wales
“In-between-ness” and inclusivity
I have suggested that Williams’ work relate to dwelling-as-preservation, while also suggesting that it carries other topopoetic resonances. In short, that it has a complex and inclusive relationship to place where a sense of dwelling-as-maintenance is modified by senses of the liminal and in-between, of defamiliarization and transformation, and by something akin to Cresswell’s notion of an awareness of the moment as a place. Cresswell’s reading of Elizabeth Bishop may be relevant here, notwithstanding Williams’ ‘sense of rootedness that never wavers’ (in Bala 1999: 136). Tooby points to the significance of what he refers to as a “torn-ness” in Williams’ work, a quality that leads him to identify her as ‘another modern exemplary exile’ who has had to find ‘places to study, places to work, places to generate fresh ideas’ beyond Wales, but equally as someone who has used that experience to celebrate and analyse ‘the place which is home’ (ibid.: 31). While Cresswell’s reading of Elizabeth Bishop may be less obviously relevant to Williams’ work than his other readings, it helps to clarify, and perhaps to qualify, something of that “torn-ness”.
Being and becoming
Cresswell sees Burnside as focusing on the formation of ‘identity and dwelling’ understood as much as spaces of becoming as of being, so that his work is seen as offering a “continuing sense of being haunted by a feeling of “home” as something that we seek, and may even inhabit, but can never truly possess’. It’s in relation to this, and to Burnside’s exploration of ‘the nature of dwelling – of being‐in‐the-world – through a focus on the liminal and the in-between’ (2015: 93 & 117), that I would suggest certain similarities with resonances in Williams’ work.
Black Garden (1984)
A Sense of Place (1989)
Alphabet (1991)
A formal strategy that Williams has frequently employed is the use of a box or shallow box-like container that, to a greater or lesser degree, is at odds with the sense of what it “contains”. This strategy animates Boxed Sea (1982), Black Garden (1984), Journey (1989), A Sense of Place (1989) and, significantly, Alphabet (1991), which resonates with the desire to be “at home” in language, despite it being something that we can never either fully inhabit. Cresswell on Burnside is also suggestive in relation to Museum (1995), where the vividness of the differentiated matter of memory – one possible reading of the rich skeins of variously-coloured embroidery silk – hangs free above a mahogany archive box. Skeins that may also remember the fact that Williams, who still has long hair, had a long plait as a child, something she still keeps ‘wrapped in a chiffon scarf’. (in Curtis 2000: 224). As is often the case with her works, I sense an ongoing “conversation” between Museum, The Blue Bow, and My Grandmother’s Hair. The last is an installation that, like The Blue Bow, references familial memories as embodied in the keeping of locks or plaits of hair and involved the artist hanging ‘fine silk fibre which resembled hair in a curtain from the ceiling’; something she describes as ‘about keeping and containing’ and the memory of all her grandmothers. (ibid.: 231) To anyone familiarising themselves with her work as a whole, this “conversational” aspect – a “plait” also forms an element in Objects and Ashes (1995) – gives an additional sense of relationality to her work. A relationality that, in this case and on the evidence of Menna Elfyn’s five poems on the topic of hair included in Perfect Blemish / Perffaith Nan, would appear to speak to generations of Welsh women and girls. But also, as the poem Mamiath / Mother Tongue suggests, touches on an old and perhaps near-universal language between mother and daughter, grandmother and granddaughter. One that’s inseparable from daily acts of care between generations.
Tim Cresswell reads Don McKay’s poetry as indicative of how a poet comes to be ‘implicated in the process of dwelling by his or her transformation of worlds into words which fail’. A failure that, despite which the poet’s twisting language ‘for all it’s worth’, does succeed in making evident ‘the faulty seam that connects and separates us to and from the world’. (2015: 127-128 & 143) An understanding I take to chime with that of Miroslav Holub referenced earlier. David Alston draws our attention to the fact that Williams ‘will agonise over titles’, something he takes as indicative of her concern with ‘the potency of meaning’. He continues:
Occasionally they come early in the making of the work and remain, lending an underpinning if allusive atmosphere to the work. Subtleties and nuances of titles found on occasion first in Welsh and translated into the less resonant, more empirical English have posed problems. A work with the wrong title fails for the artist as a work… Work and title must be matched to stand together to reference the experience of the world (2000, 06-07).
Extrapolating from this, might we see Williams as engaged with, and correspondingly placed within, an intense but endlessly ambiguous relationship with the different potencies of three “languages”? That is, as finding herself uncertainly placed between the richness of the Welsh language, particularly with regard to topographic matters, one which she understands but no longer speaks, the ‘less resonant, more empirical English’ lacking the vital ‘subtleties and nuances’ of Welsh, and finally the richly haptic “language” of her visual work? Work that “speaks” primarily to our bodies while also evoking memories and cultural knowledge, all in ways that are finally irreducible to any verbal formulation. My own sense is that Williams understands that the lived nuances of one language can never be adequately translated into another, but also that the constant attempt to do so is necessary to ensure that we do not ‘live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence’ (Steiner 1966: 25). I surmise, then, that the ‘standing together’ of work and title, like the translation of experience into sculptural form, is for Williams a necessary process echoing the ultimate “failure” to transform worlds into words. A “failure” that, paradoxically, succeeds in making present the “uncertain seam” that both connects and separates us from the world.
A temporary suspension of time?
Earlier I referred to Mark Doty’s characterisation of Elisabeth Bishop as giving herself over, in The Fish, ‘to experiencing an object’ in such a way as to lead to: ‘an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action’ (2010: 23). An experience I take to be related both to Cresswell’s understanding of JorieGraham’s Place and Paula Meehan’s claim that poetry ‘stops time’. That’s to say to poetic acts by which universal themes – Williams’ ‘the human condition, the passage of time, and mortality’ – are brought into contact with the specific particularities of place and individual experience. Acts which create the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (Cresswell 2015: 172). Acts that also enable universal themes to become immediately present to us in the here-and-now, because ‘“something catches”’; something which is ‘in the end, all we have to hold on to and care for’ (ibid.: 169). We are briefly suspended then, through such moments of “catching”, in a silent sense of presence compounded in different degrees of the vitality of life, the depth of memory, and the inevitability of death. In this context lines from Graham’s poem Treadmill (2012: 34-36) seem to me indicative of the play between “ravelling” and “unravelling” already referred to in relation to Williams’ work:
… fine
yarn you would ravel
back to its place of
origin-
All this said, however, and while Cresswell’s account of Graham’s work chimes with my sense of particular qualities in Williams’ work, I cannot identify that “catching” in terms of the observable qualities of individual pieces. In short, I have now come to a limit in terms of what can be written here, one that I will now try to describe.
A Different Kind of Light (200)
I have in front of me the reproduction of A Different Kind of Light (2000) in the catalogue for Objects and Ashes, Williams’ exhibition at the Djanogly Art Gallery at the University of Nottingham in 2000. I know that, as is so often the case, this work has evolved further. Williams writes that she made it for Objects and Ashes exhibition, where it was shown on the floor.
However, she writes that:
… later at a small private space in London I placed the objects on shelves. This work arose from an experience several years before when I went to St Andrews to research the making of a piece for Crawford Art Centre. Diane Sykes was the curator. The exhibition Grave Goods was to do with contemporary artists responses to the Bronze Age funerary vessels in the St Andrews Collection. I spent a long time with the burial urns. I made work which went into the show which I didn’t think worked especially well but much later I began to make these ‘vessels’ and I realised it was to do with being in that room with those special things all those years before (Email to the author, 21.04.2024).
Despite this knowledge, possession of a good quality reproduction, and my willingness to imagine my way into the work, an attempt to sense the resonant particularities and tensions central to it can only remain partial. Intellectually and emotionally I sense similarities and differences between the simple yet densely worked white cotton objects, their suggestion of being variations on a theme. I am also alert to the implication of some kind of illumination offered by the title and further underlined by knowing that the work is in part a response to Bronze Age funerary vessels. However, what I very clearly lack is immediate corporeal experience of the work’s physical presence, something that sets a very real psychophysical limit on my ability to “enter into it” fully. I can intuit, but not fully experience, the lyrical suspension of time through which, in Cresswell’s reading of Graham, a moment becomes a place. This clear limitation is even more obvious when I am faced with a densely configured installation such as Arcady (2012), Williams’ collaboration with Michael Tooby, first shown at Goat Major Projects, Cardiff, in 2012 and later at MuVIM in Valencia.