Steven Williams

Born in Germany in 1982, I studied art and fashion at De Montfort University and UCLAN, after which I continued to develop my art alongside a career in commercial photography. For fifteen years, my practice was almost solely photographic. It wasn’t until I spent nine months travelling across India, South and Southeast Asia that I began to draw again. I have spent the proceeding years developing a practice which encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles and ceramics. 

My inspirations are often fragments of memory or thoughts of a certain time, place or encounter. A non-linear visual diary of sorts. My travels, popular and queer culture are recurring themes, as are ideas about identity, politics, mortality and commemoration, all bound together in a style which finds its origins in the cartoons of my childhood.

Paper is saturated in layers of colour and line with a sense of spontaneity once the intimidation of the white surface is overcome. As the work evolves, in some instances beyond the paper itself,  I settle into a state of reflection about the initial trigger. My mind wanders, emotions are agitated and experiences re-lived. Some details become less relevant whilst other elements are exaggerated, twisted by time, leading to a heightened, distorted, sometimes abstracted impression of the original idea. There is an ever-present tension between black and white, life and death, and the colour of everything in between.

It’s an introspective, often subversive process underpinned by anxiety, ageing and a dark humour ; an attempt to make sense of the world and my place in it…