Sound Vessels for Pieces in Polystyrene Sculpture

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 pleasure of the work, there is something melancholic about it too.' －Deborah Burnstone, Artist Caro Williams was born in Hong Kong and studied fine art in London and Auckland. She was awarded a postgraduate research scholarship and an MA in sculpture (1st class Hons) from AUT Auckland. Caro exhibits in galleries and outside environments both nationally and internationally. She has received a number of awards and funding for her work, including the 2013 Headland Sculpture Biannually Selectors Award, and was a 2016 recipient of the Creative New Zealand WW1 Centenary Co-commissioning Fund. Projects include Cicatrix 2016-2018, an international artist collaboration with exhibitions and residencies in New Zealand, UK, and Canada. and in 2019, together with Deborah Burnstone, she co-curated Contemporary Art + Ritual, a group exhibition at the Crypt Gallery, London. Caro is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS), Arts Territory Exchange, and Axisweb. Caro’s work is held in public and private collections including the Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand, and Luciano Benetton Imago Mundi Collection, Italy.