Kate Williams
Kate Williams (UK) lives and works in London. Her practice is concerned with artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of derealisation they can provoke. Drawing on her own experience of a psychoanalysis, her latest body of work Soft explores comfort – its capacity to soothe, but also to seduce or suffocate – and themes of atomisation and self-estrangement in a wholly mediated culture. Her series Soft Cell examines the allure of relinquishing agency in return for a soothing softness or sense of weightlessness – an anaesthetic against postmodern culture.
Soft Core explores ‘self-soothing’ in the context of imagery, consumption and sensation – whatis at stake when we consume to be consumed, or subsume the erotic into a pornotopia whose images refer only to themselves? Williams was previously a film-maker, producing visual essays in cultural analysis.
Solo exhibition: Softcore, 74 Beulah Rd E17, London (2024). Group exhibitions include: felt,
expressed, chosen, SLQS Gallery, London (2025), Something Quickening, Panrucker Gallery, London (2024); Permission to touch? The Dot Project, London (2024); Pourquoi London – Gertrude X Canopy Collections, London (2024); Quilts: A Material Culture, Batsford Gallery,
London (2023)