Josie
Williams
Working across printmaking, sculpture and water-based media, I create hybrid forms and imagined worlds that explore how bodies, materials and environments shape one another. At the centre of my practice is an interest in connection: between body and landscape, memory and material, fragility and endurance. My work is rooted in close observation of natural processes: growth, decay, weathering, adaptation and renewal, and in the ways these processes can become carriers of memory, emotion and meaning. In printmaking, I work primarily through a subtractive dark-field process, gradually wiping back, reworking and layering inked surfaces until figures and landscapes begin to emerge. This intuitive, materially responsive approach allows images to develop through discovery rather than fixed design. The same principle extends into my sculptural work, where I use fragile and organic materials for the bodily, sensory and symbolic associations they hold. Through tearing, staining, dyeing, burning and weathering, I alter these materials until they appear marked by time and experience. My work draws on the language of folklore, natural history and speculative storytelling, not to illustrate fixed narratives, but to create spaces in which meanings can gather. Human, animal and environmental forms become entangled, creating ambiguous figures, fragments and habitats that resist simple classification. I aim to make work that feels both strange and familiar, inviting reflection on our relationship with the living world.
Materials: Assemblage, Etching, Found, Lithography, Modelling, Monoprint, Oil, Paper, Pastel, Pen & Ink, Pencil, Relief Print, Watercolour