artist bio

Since 2023, Gilda Williams’ main activity is a fabric- and stitching-based studio practice, focusing on traditions of abstract art, often imagined in textiles and other untraditional media including vinyl, decals, masking tape, mohair, silk and recycled fabrics.

Williams often considers the relationship between painting — a fabric (canvas) on which colour (paint) is applied — and textile, also a fabric but where colour is imbued, usually as a dye. Her work asks why the two media of painting and textile, which are materially so similar, enjoy such different status and separate histories. What can textile do that painting cannot, and vice versa?

Her cover series, for example, translates abstract paintings by noted 20th-century artists — Sophie Tauber-Arp, Agnes Martin, On Kawara, Bridget Riley, Josef Albers, among others — into alternative non-painterly media: a silk-pleated Riley, a quilted Albers, an embroidered Lucio Fontana, a Mark Rothko tapestry.

For some three decades prior, Williams worked as an art critic, principally as London contributor to Artforum (2005-23) and MFA Senior Lecturer  at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2008-23). Full bio here.

First day in the studio, February 2023