Understanding my process (I need to understand it too)

Pop up gallery 'Debenhams 2021' - what is this work all about ?

I have just taken some of my reconfigured MA work down from a pop up gallery in the closed Debenhams store in LLanelli. I had very little time to think it through and just put a link to my Instagram account in the window.

I was contacted by a friend of mine last week, and he said that he would have liked an explanation about the work in order to understand where it had come from. This is an old chestnut when it comes to visual art, and one that I have frequently struggled with.

So I sat in my garden this morning, and contemplated this point, and listened to the inner voice, and this voice (that we all have if we are still enough to listen), spoke.

"WE NEED TO BE SOFT LIKE CLAY, NOT HARD LIKE GRANITE." Sophie Williamson 2021

I felt a heavy weight of deep sadness in my soul. I see my privilege, I see it, I see the flotsam and jetsam of my life - and I see the threads of the healing voice, in organisations of activism - in love of our planet. I see and hear the dead voices of 'wealth' and irresponsible capitalism, of holding on to gold, power, colonialism, territories, of not understanding what real wealth is. 

There are bright stars though - many many bright suns in the universe. The voice said this is your life now, feet upon the rewilding coal tip. This place is a gift.

Gifts are there if we have the eyes and ears to see and hear. This is now.

I dream about the living pulse that is life, I dream of landscapes. I am a dreamer, I interpret dreams that filter through the dross, dreams of leaf, tree, clay, lichen, living stones. I am interconnected in those dreams with other souls who also see connectedness, diversity, non hierarchical structures, community as rich and layered, each part vital.

That is what this work is about.

The landscape dreaming of the sea it came from