Caro Williams

Caro Williams is a London-based installation and mixed media artist who works with symbols, sound, language, and nuance.

'Caro Williams’ work is actually quite hard to describe in a nutshell but that doesn’t detract from its accessibility and magic. Indeed its refusal to be pinned down goes to its very heart.

Caro recently wrote that she is ‘searching for the moment in which intelligibility fades into ambiguity and mystery.’ She often translates or ‘processes’ things – sounds, words, film clips, lines from poems, ideas – into another materiality through erasure, covering, digital manipulation or reconstitution via another substance. There is a poetic oddness to these processes. Sounds are silenced as they get transformed into materials (for example, sound waveforms in glinting metal, or silence is made manifest through the lushness of velvet) and these in turn become apprehended by another sense – sight – as well as a visceral appreciation of the material used.

The process of translation leaves a kind of poem in the viewer’s mind. We are suspended in a dreamlike space where meaning is ambiguous: we see and hear something that is familiar yet at the same time it is out of reach. Perhaps this is why, despite the beauty and...

ART QUALIFICATIONS
2008 Master of Arts (1st class Hons), AUT, Auckland
2005 Bachelor of Visual Arts, AUT, Auckland
1996 Foundation Fine Art, Camberwell College of Arts, London

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
2018 Funding and Support received from New Zealand Embassy, London

2017 Funding in kind and Support received from Manurewa Local Board, Auckland Council

2016 Funding and Support received from Creative New Zealand –WW100 Co-commissioning Fund

2015 Finalist (2nd place in category), Celeste 7th International Contemporary Art Prize

2015 Awarded – Distinguished Artist Award, ArtAscent, Art & Literature Journal, June 2015

2014 Finalist, 23rd Annual Wallace Art Awards

2013 Awarded the Gen-i Selector’s Award, Headland Sculpture On The Gulf, Waiheke

2008 Awarded the Wallace Arts Trust Award for Most Promising Visual Arts Postgraduate

2007 Awarded a Postgraduate Research Scholarship (Visual Arts), AUT University

Recent Exhibitions
2020
Summer Exhibition, Royal Society of Sculptors, London

Sound Library, Arts Terrirtoy Exchange and Muck (Must Use Critical Knowledge)

Automated, Fringe Arts Bath, Virtual edition

In the Silent Air selected for inclusion in Fabrizio Paterlini – Piano Microstories – The Eighth Note Publication

2019
4th Today’s Documents: A Stitch in Time, Arts Territory Exchange, Today Art Museum, Beijing

Soundscape – Iceland selected as New Art Highlight by Axisweb (23-29 September 2019)

Put this in Your Window and Think of Me – Arts Territory Exchange, Dept of Land Economy Cambridge University and Cambridge Artworks Gallery

The Blue Hour selected as New Art Highlight by Axisweb (13-19 May 2019)

Contemporary Art + Ritual, (co-curator + exhibiting artist), Crypt Gallery, London

2018
Cicatrix Imprime, Atelier Circulaire Gallery, Montreal, Canada

Cicatrix, Swindon Museum & Art Gallery, Swindon, UK

Call and Response, Trowbridge Arts, Trowbridge, UK

Shifting Ground off-site, London, as a solo component of Shifting Ground, Silo 6, Auckland, NZ

Peace Drawings I II, III selected in Five2Watch: NEON by Axisweb

2017
Call and Response (Solo exhibition), Nathan Homestead, Au...