Information on works in selected recent exhibitions:

TIME > WW Gallery
Twilight II
2010, DVD 15 mins
H. Williams' charming painting ‘Twilight' is a portrait of himself and his wife Marjorie in their sitting room in 1994. Ten years later Chiara Williams began a video portrait of Bill & Marjorie, her grandparents, in the same room. But with their health quickly deteriorating from cancer and Alzheimer's, she was only able to capture a few minutes of footage on the last day she spent with them both together. The footage lay untouched for several years and when recovered, she found it too had deteriorated. The resulting film ‘Twilight II' is a montage of a couple of hours spent with them as the light of day fades to evening; a patchwork of singing, laughing, crying, lost sound, dropped frames and empty spaces.

BOTH ENDS BURNING > WW Gallery
Venus de Milo
2009, copper, vintage ink wells, record player, paint brush, Financial Times
Continuing her exploration of the myth of the Goddess, Chiara Williams's two-part assemblage sculpture ‘Venus de Milo' uses matching ink wells, a dry paintbrush, broken record player, steel and copper elements from a television, to reflect on the disarming and disabling of the Goddess. The alchemical symbol for copper is also the symbol for the planet Venus and the international symbol for the female. Here the absence of creative output, sound or picture, mimics the missing limbs of the iconic Aphrodite of Milos and the subsequent fetishising of the image in a patriarchal society. In this work, Williams develops themes and formal elements from her previous work ‘Birth of Venus'.

NOISE OF ART > East End Arts Club
Medusa
2009, mixed media on 12 inch vinyl
The Turkish Bath
2009, mixed media on 12 inch vinyl
Curated by Infinity Bunce and Helen Edwards, The Noise of Art is an exhibition of customized vinyl records. A diverse group of artists, including urban artists, graphic designers and musicians, has created paintings, collages and mixed media works on 12" vinyl. Over 75 works of art that range from delicate depictions such as Fiona Watson's work to bolder pieces by Michael Campbell and Chiara Williams make up a colourful chart of hits. (http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/011713.php)

TRAVELLING LIGHT LONDON > VENICE BIENNALE & WW Gallery
Birth of Venus
2009, powder compact, egg yolk, ultramarine pigment
For her participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale, she presented 'Birth of Venus'. The piece is a transcription of Botticelli’s renaissance painting of the same title, which depicts a fully-grown woman emerging from the sea on a shell. The work consists of a frozen egg yolk sitting on a bed of ultramarine pigment in a powder compact. The spherical yolk seems alien; soft like a piece of fruit, shimmering like a pearl. Its use revisits earlier work by the artist, an interest in colour and themes of eroticism, paganism, fertility, beauty and vanity.

IRLANDA ZANTONE > 2008 - 2009, various exhibitions
This was a year long art project during which time Chiara Williams worked and exhibited under the fictive pseudonym of Irlanda Zantone, producing a number of paintings and works on paper about idenity, vanity and unattainable, idealised beauty.

PG: PARENTAL GUIDANCE > WW Gallery
Just what is it that makes today's bathrooms so different, so appealing?
2009, found object, pigment, hair
A bizarre pound-shop find is the basis of 'Just what is it that makes today's bathrooms so different, so appealing?'. This strange hybrid object is a ceramic sculpture, boxed and framed, both the bathroom from a doll's house and an 'art work' to be hung on a wall. Within the home the bathroom is a shared family space, but also a place of privacy and intimacy, a place where we are naked and vulnerable, where we can confront, cleanse and purge our physical selves. Williams covered the entire surface of the ready-made, first in flesh tint paint and then with hair. Although the bathroom is empty, we are voyeurs into this private domestic space, participants before this strange stage set. Here the flesh colour makes us aware of our own nakedness, as if our own privacy has been invaded. Hair, human or otherwise always repels and disgusts. Once defiled, we aren't always able to wash ourselves clean.

MINK SCHMINK > WW Gallery
For this show, Williams used a tiny label as the basis for the invitation to the show.

I SAW THREE SHIPS > WW Gallery
And My True Love Gave to Me
2008, black stockings, sheepskin rug, dog, dvd fire.
"The tone is set by an installation of a video hearth-fire before a sheep skin rug, overhung with not-so-traditional lace-top stockings. The surrealism of mass-market Christmas imagery is also literally magnified in Chiara Williams' prints Hold on Tight. And Down We Go, a tiny embroidered decoration of unknown origin, enlarged to monumental proportions and reversed to create a vivid, abstract field of colour."

I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT > WW Gallery
For I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night, Williams showed a new photographic diptych entitled Odalisque. Williams has Synesthesia, a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. These photographs were taken 'blindly' in a steam room, opening up the process to random outcomes of depth of field, focus and framing, creating works that are more suggestive than descriptive, alluding to a place rather than describing it explicitly. The photographs are meant to engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual senses and responses. The reductionism and abstraction of Odalisque comes out of a modernist and minimalist aesthetic, while the subject and its composition emerge from the artist's renewed interest in the Renaissance and Neoclassicism. This is all played out in the shifting depth, space and perspective of the picture plane, while recalling pivotal moments in the history of painting and cinema or simply functioning as a sensory experience, depending on the viewer's frame of reference. The shadowy yet seductive finish of the photographs also hints at the reality of the Odalisque's life; glossed over and eroticised by male Western 19th Century painters, the concept of 'The Gaze' continues to be of interest in our 21st century society.