Deb K Williams

A group show responding to the theme of 'Tactile'.

I was a recipient of a Making Space grant from the Moreland Council. I used this opportunity to explore the process of reconstituting locally sourced clay found near my home. I created a series of small clay works that reflected my interest in Melrose Ware, the domestic table ware that was created in the ‘art pottery division’ of The Hoffman Brick, Tile and Pottery Company, in Brunswick during the 1930’s. Melrose Ware extensively used indigenous flora and fauna motifs as decorative elements in the work.

An exhibition with Sandra Tobias. Textiles and drawings. Deb K Williams responds to the connection between various textile processes and drawing, and the contemplative, meditative nature of these activities. Using graphite, natural dyes, inks, acrylics and collaged felt, silk and cotton, the works reflect an interest in hybrid forms and more broadly the delights and strangeness of the natural world. Much of the work attempts to evoke the forms and textures of nature and increasingly issues of sustainability, ecology and inter-connectedness are examined. The embroidered ‘maps’ reflect upon the increasingly dense and vaguely toxic urban environments of inner cities, where the routes to greener spaces are ever diminishing but increasingly necessary. The graphite drawings form part of a larger body of work that reinterprets a personal archive of actual and imagined landscape images. They are maps of imaginary but familiar worlds and respond to memory, atmosphere and place.