Josie Williams
(she/her)
Working across printmaking and sculpture, I create hybrid forms and imagined worlds that reflect on the fragile relationship between bodies, environments and inherited systems of meaning and control; focussing on how experiences of disconnection and silencing might also contain the possibility of resistance, adaptation and renewal.
I am drawn to forms that feel discovered rather than designed. In printmaking, I work primarily through a subtractive dark-field process, gradually wiping back and reworking inked surfaces until figures begin to emerge from the plate. This intuitive and materially responsive approach extends into my sculptural practice. I deliberately select fragile materials for the bodily, emotional and symbolic associations they carry. I enhance and transform these materials through tearing, dyeing, weathering and burning, pushing them into precarious states where they must hold tension and structure without reliance on hidden armatures or stable frameworks. My aim is to create forms that, through the damage they have sustained, appear caught between care and violence, fragility and strength, endurance and collapse – perhaps in the process of becoming something else. Human, animal and environmental forms become entangled within the work, evoking both suffering and resilience whilst reflecting a search for connection, transformation and voice within an increasingly unstable and fractured world.
Taxonomy of Becoming
Taxonomy of Becoming, Taxonomy: Specimen I and Minor Bodies, form part of an ongoing exploration of classification, transformation and speculative biology. Drawing on the visual language of the monstrous feminine, scientific specimens, museum archives and anatomical studies, the works examine tensions between systems that attempt to define, preserve or contain bodies and continual processes of change and becoming that resist fixed categorisation.
For Sale
For Sale
For Sale
For Sale
Fragile Bodies
Using fragile and organic materials including burnt paper, lunaria, bones wax and found organic materials, these works explore tensions between vulnerability and resilience, growth and collapse, care and violence. Delicate structures are often held in states of suspension and instability, whilst damaged materials become symbolic of transformation, survival and the persistence of bodies under pressure.
Dissolution
These works are connected through a sense of emergence, perhaps from concealment or constraints. In print, I work primarily through a subtractive dark-field technique. Ink is gradually removed and reworked until forms begin to surface from within the ink. Figures appear fragmented, shifting or only partly visible, creating works that feel discovered rather than fully resolved. This extends beyond the image itself through the use of shaped photolitho plates and fragmented forms that resist fixed boundaries.
The ‘Moretta Muta’* appears in some pieces as a recurring motif associated with social control; connecting to ideas surrounding the abject feminine and the tension between visibility and voicelessness. In my work it is treated not as a historical object, but a site of resistance, a shifting symbolic form that is eroded, absorbed, dissolved into the surface.
*The Moretta Muta was a round, black 17th-18th century Venetian mask worn exclusively by women to indicate pious modesty or alluring mystery. Instead of employing ribbon ties to secure the mask, it was held in place by a button gripped between the teeth, rendering the wearer completely silent.
