Artist: Dinah Williams

My work emerges from the interplay between my subject and myself. I am the director; I assemble the pieces and build the world. She does more than play a role; she reveals a reality.

 
Water supports and unbalances, frees and drowns, reveals and obscures. In the flow of the unconscious, things sink and rise from the depths; thoughts eddy and swirl.

 
She is both loosened and enclosed by this watery element. She has become a seawitch, a mermaid, a monster. Rich in substances, she is made from the material which surrounds and ensnares her – water, weeds, roots, hair, pearls, snails and drowned petals. She revolves in a trance; she ebbs, she flows.


She doesn’t speak in words.

She is her own society, her own species. She is languid but wily. She spawns, she excretes.
 
The snails are her familiars. They are our familiars. They are hard, spiraling vessels for secrets, slime, and unformed thought. They trace shining trails over her body and through the pictures. They leave evidence. They suggest.
 
The world of the paintings — of ponds, of tubs, of empty shells and the spaces between things —is the world of the self. There is a permeable membrane between my self and hers, between this created but tangible world and ours. Things flow in, things flow out. Through alignment and pressure, the overlap of contours, the eschewal of boundaries, we trick solipsism. All that can be known is the self, but together we expand the self infinitely.

 

One Response to “Artist: Dinah Williams”
  1. Ling Jiane says:

    In the Ophelia-reminiscent piece, the female body getting drowned creates, in her possiblity of coming back to life again, a space of her own, secretive, spiritual and inspirational, as the artist says of her art that is part of her self, her world. The overwhelming water image, which is traditionally asscociated with the female, is transcended by a mystic beauty and power that may seem threatening to an eye used to be a passive body like Hamlet’s Ophelia in the male gaze. If in death life comes back doesn’t seem a brand new theme, the delicatedly blurred sensual female body in a fairy quality but all too human color speaks for herself, her choice, or any choice we are making, daily, to make a life for ourselves. In this light, it is an existential piece by a female artist who self-consciously pursue her life and art in one. Cheers for Dinah, and thanks to the Left Bank receptionist who kindly printed her bio page for me, which only made my short trip to Essex as perfect as “the best small town in America” is. Does it matter how many Chinese has, by chance or on purposed, walked on the land of seagulls and histories, mosaic ice and impressionist oils?

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