Tomb painting
Shades cast shadows: this is the import of Therese Williams’ shell portraits. They were miniature habitations whose occupants left: put to the ear, they whisper the language of ghosts. They get collected, rehoused in the studio where, out of earshot of the sea, they grow flat and grey, only their odd muscularity and their Kandinsky daubing keeping them in the corner of the eye. The life of the house goes on overhead and down below the shells are sorting themselves out into families. It is the time between life in the sea and rebirth in the eye of the seer; and then one day the artist opens the door and the surge of the upper world floods in. It is progress of a sort, to render these little tombs lifelike, in the stillness of a portrait to cast their shadow.
Then, in the slow scaling of the paintstroke, it is as if the shells are reshelled, made interior to our dreams of being sheltered somewhere. It is not shells on the walls, but the walls as shell we see. Each of these inquisitively rendered natural forms is perceived as the genius loci of a place we have yet to make our own. You would give them to a friend planning to leave, intimating safe journey, homecoming. They would bring the steadying susurration of family trees to new houses. You could live with these and never be far from the depths of the sea. You wonder about the creatures who extruded these conspicuous camouflages, who insisted on the manufacture of such complex chambers: how in the blindness of their forthcoming tombs did they imagine the world outside? Therese Williams makes me think they did it by seeing all the world housed inside, womb, tomb, ear and cave, one great family of resounding memories.
Paul Carter
Shades cast shadows: this is the import of Therese Williams’ shell portraits. They were miniature habitations whose occupants left: put to the ear, they whisper the language of ghosts. They get collected, rehoused in the studio where, out of earshot of the sea, they grow flat and grey, only their odd muscularity and their Kandinsky daubing keeping them in the corner of the eye. The life of the house goes on overhead and down below the shells are sorting themselves out into families. It is the time between life in the sea and rebirth in the eye of the seer; and then one day the artist opens the door and the surge of the upper world floods in. It is progress of a sort, to render these little tombs lifelike, in the stillness of a portrait to cast their shadow.
Then, in the slow scaling of the paintstroke, it is as if the shells are reshelled, made interior to our dreams of being sheltered somewhere. It is not shells on the walls, but the walls as shell we see. Each of these inquisitively rendered natural forms is perceived as the genius loci of a place we have yet to make our own. You would give them to a friend planning to leave, intimating safe journey, homecoming. They would bring the steadying susurration of family trees to new houses. You could live with these and never be far from the depths of the sea. You wonder about the creatures who extruded these conspicuous camouflages, who insisted on the manufacture of such complex chambers: how in the blindness of their forthcoming tombs did they imagine the world outside? Therese Williams makes me think they did it by seeing all the world housed inside, womb, tomb, ear and cave, one great family of resounding memories.
Paul Carter