about   

             (c) Mandy Williams 2008, from Memento Mori

Mandy Williams is interested in the social dynamics arising from contemporary culture - particularly how personal identity is affected by environment and how our social and affective lives interconnect. Her interest in the psychology of place and how a sense of home is created and sustained has been a catalyst for both autobiographical and voyeuristic projects, documentary approaches to more conceptual ones. Although much of her photographic and video work has centred on the domestic home, projects frequently refer more broadly to place and specifically sites in transition. In Presence (2001), an exhibition of photography, video and sound, she focused on the conflicting desire to create a home or connection with a stranger balanced by the need for distance and anonymity. In her video, Filler (2003), she explored how empathy is expressed in popular culture and the blurring of private emotion and public display.

Recent exhibition projects include Lost Voices (2010), a photography and sound installation exploring aural memories in abandoned spaces; Home (2009), a photographic series of small paper houses examining media stories of broken homes, and Memento Mori (2008), text and photographic work exploring Internet memorials and the way we preserve memory. This last project developed into a further photographic series called Re-Collect (2009), about emotion and memory.

Mandy Williams lives and works in London. She studied art history at Warwick and Communications (Film) at Goldsmith’s. She lived in Vancouver, Canada for several years, and was represented by a commercial gallery where she had solo exhibitions of photographic and video works, as well as exhibiting in artist-run and public galleries across Canada and the United States. She was awarded a visual arts grant from the Canada Council and had work purchased by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Since returning to London, she has exhibited in various group exhibitions including the London Art Fair, Royal West of England Academy, where she won a prize for the best original print, Raven Row, London, Museum of New Art, Detroit, and had a solo show, Waiting for You at House Gallery, London in March 2013. Her work has been reviewed as 'sensually and psychologically intriguing' (Asian Art News), possessing 'moments and places of tension because the characters in her work take risks to get there' (Lola Magazine, Toronto).

 

2013