JANELLE WILLIAMS
Alongside my career of 40 years as a secondary visual art teacher, I have slowly built a practice with my own artwork since 2009. Being a resident artist at Crate for over 17 years has given me the space to experiment and explore materials and processes and to develop my own aesthetic responses to these materials.
My work is always material driven and I am interested in the way objects connect with and hold memory. I select surfaces and materials that carry association and meaning for me. My work reawakens and recalls my memories of the interiors of the 1960’s house I grew up in as a child in Brisbane. Compositionally, many of my works can be read as aerial blueprints of real and imagined mid-century floor plans with their simple geometric arrangement of spaces.
Growing from a structural framework, my art works grows in layers and directions based on the interconnections that emerge between formal shapes and the colours and textures injected by the vintage textiles that I have collected over many years. I work intuitively and let the surfaces and colours from reclaimed and remnant materials dictate the way the compositions build and grow.
I am intrigued by the way hard construction materials and soft textiles contrast and combine with each other. I want to create a push-pull relationship between the viewer and the artwork when they view the rigid constructed surfaces against the soft sculptural use of textiles and thread. I am interested in the contrast of hard and soft surfaces and the subtle overlaps of different elevations using protruding dowels or falling fabrics to cast shadow and create depth. I create low relief structures that are reminiscent of domestic interiors that are filled with fragments of the imaginary dwelling contained in my mind.
My work is about suggesting and revealing lived histories that are held in the core of even the most mundane of materials. I am interested in materialism of objects and the charismatic qualities of objects and surfaces both real and invented.
