Kate Williams

KATE WILLIAMS’ work explores artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of estrangement they can provoke. The series Soft Cell examines the allure of giving up our agency in return for a deep comfort : its capacity to soothe and seduce, but also to suffocate. The viewer is encouraged to oscillate between planes; the works hope to leave him mildly unsettled – caught between a delicious anticipation of being enveloped, and anxiety at the potential for being suffocated or consumed. Although the works imagine architectural forms, it’s flesh-like femaleness combined with sugary pastel palette – there is something here about how women experience their embodiedness – ambivalence about touching and being touched, of the many constructions of the female body; being flesh and yet somehow absent. The work pushes the three-dimensional qualities of quilts towards sculpture, the artists uses a piecing rather than appliqué; each element is drawn and cut from linen union, then attached to its neighbour. It’s then layered with wool and cotton and machine-quilted – an industrialised process which seems more fitting to the content of her pieces than handwork.