archive

THE ViSITATION

Installation comprising a drawing and painting in oil paint and oil bar onto printed velvet (145 x 200cm), plus two collages (16 x 24 cm each).
Layered images are derived from Pontormo's de-saturated paintings of the Visitazione, a photograph of The Marble Curtain (Cheddar Gorge), and an hysteroscopic photograph of a womb. Overall dimensions variable.

THE THICKNESS OF A NEW SKIN

Standing stones, 2019
sculptural intervention upon an existing public art work, on the site of the old tourist information office, Margate
(cloth, sugar solution, vinyl photograph)

The Thickness of a New Skin, 2019, video loop, 3 mins

The Thickness of a New Skin, 2019, video stills

The thickness of a new skin, sculptural installation (cloth, sugar solution, casts of standing stones, vinyl photograph) and collaboration with Helder Clara for #plusone at Limbo, Margate (Helder's work is the aluminium foil on floor and aluminium foil sphere)

Santa Teresa, 2019, mixed media painting and sculpture (jesmonite, graphite, gesso, pigment, copper, velvet, emulsion)

Nymph, 2019, mixed media painting and sculpture (jesmonite, gesso, pigment, satin, copper, mirror)

Le Triomphe de Pan, 2019, mixed media diptych painting

The Mouse Druid, 2019, mixed media painting and sculpture (jesmonite, rubber, emulsion, green scene scatter grass, bed sheet)

Monument to the small, 2019, mixed media painting and sculpture (plinth, marble, lard, stone henge model, postcards, pigment, emulsion, green scene scatter grass, green velvet, mouse intervention)

Curtain, 2019, mixed media sculpture (shower curtains, photographs, postcards)

O mia bambina cara, 2019, performance, 5 mins

Hush, 2018
installation with carpet, wallpaper, mattress, mirrors, mug, book and paintings.
(paintings: Hush #1 - #10 acrylic and violet pigment on canvas board, 40cm diameter)
Room 304, The Nayland Rock Hotel, At the Violet Hour, Margate, 2018

“She turns and looks a moment in the glass
Hardly aware of her departed lover”

‘The Lost Madonna’, a novel of suspense, had been left in room 304 by a former guest, alongside a broken, round, ceramic bathroom mirror and a stained, golden mattress, slumped against a dusty-pink carpet and peeling woodchip…these artefacts, touched by a fading sunset on Williams’s first visit to the room, seemed to neatly dovetail with the uneasy atmosphere of the sexual encounter that takes place ‘at the violet hour’, between the typist and the clerk, as witnessed by Tiresias in The Waste Land’s ‘Fire Sermon’.

The materiality of the room’s textures, shapes and fleshy colours, together with existing preoccupations in Williams’s artistic output, led her to create a series of vignette paintings derived from film scenes in which female characters are reflected in a mirror or are otherwise constrained by cinematic framing, often in hotel settings. The resulting installation, ‘Hush’, hints at the relationship between a hotel room and the body it encloses, pacing around its perimeters, creating quiet dialogues between tactile surfaces and even, banging one’s head against the wall…

“When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone”

2008 - 2013

STATEMENTS ABOUT ARCHIVE WORK

"(a) jocular, ornate quality can be found in Chiara Williams work, who is equally as obsessed by objects and materials, found and manufactured, here with an overt set of signifiers at play. She uses copper wire from televisions to form beautifully coloured flowers, with all their association to the feminine and to the Venus and Aphrodite myths which still persist in our post feminist world. Her 'Birth of Venus' lays this bare, with its plump, glistening yolk on ultramarine pigment. The most precious of painters’ pigments, associated with the virgin’s mantle, sits in a compact, the everyday device found in handbags. Nothing is too banal to escape her commentary."

Kate Brindley, KEEPING IT REAL - In Teesside and East London, North South Divine catalogue, 2013