Sue Williams: Small Talk, High Heels

7th June – 5th July 2008

Sue Williams’ work centres on acute observations of life in a society that is saturated with media images of desires and sexual fantasies. Her provocative images are concerned with perceptions of women, with gender roles and sexual power relations. Although these representations draw to some extent on her own life experience as a woman and artist, they point at much wider issues and debates in contemporary society. Her eruptive lines, powerful brush strokes and intense colours evolve in concentrated and intense periods of activity. They are often interspersed with words, exclamations, text fragments. They lend the work a passionate immediacy and provocative directness. Her expressive representations reference and appropriate imageries that origin in the media, in popular culture, in magazines and advertisements. Challenging familiar stereotypes of femininity and respective expectations of conduct, she re-examines the private and the public, questions what is personal and what political, and thus re-considers perspectives and positions developed by feminism.

Image: Sue Williams, ‘Hi babe, where r u’, Acrylic, mixed media