In Penumbra, the native Texan continues her exploration of play as work and work as play in her art practice. Williams moves from exploding the scale of driedels and spinning tops in her first exhibition to manipulating and reconfiguring children’s building blocks.

For Williams, the process of creation is not divergent from the act of playing as a child. Her work has always been quotidian, using everyday material to impersonate objects of daily life and/or childhood. The artist creates her own customized set of toy blocks by merging angles with modified cubes to form hybrid ceramicshapes. Thesehand-builtclayformsarethen stacked to form architectonic assemblages and three- dimensional landscapes. The plinths used to display the sculptures become part of the work itself, as plinths, in themselves, are prisms. Appropriation of the plinth democratizes the authority of the object and its display, illustrating imagination and ingenuity beyond traditions of sculpture display.

Visual challenges for the viewer are compositional and conceptual challenges for the artist. The ceramicist supplants expected color with nuanced deviations: varying finishes and different hues mimic shadow and perspective, demonstrating a linear progression of immediately recognizable childhood toys into what looks like ‘art.’ The purpose of toys, in this hypothesis, is indistinguishable from the (functionless) purpose of contemporary art.

Perception is not led by the mind alone. Maurice Merleau-Ponty postulated that consciousness, our quality of awareness, is mutually engaged and intricately intertwined with the human body and its sensuous machinery. Hand molding of each of Williams’ modular shapes summon a return to the body that is two-fold: that of her viewers and that of the sculptural compositions themselves. Williams’ employment of geometry is counterbalanced by the sympathy of clay and the medium’s reliance on the human touch to find form. Independent of empiricism and intellectualism, Williams’ practice conveys a primal sense underneath her chosen medium and her stylistic indicators. It is this desire to touch, to shape, to form, to stack, and to construct that feels universal. Her spectator has in an instinctual, (pre)sensory exchange with the object, itself. The sensation of holding a block is immediate, creating an inherently phenomenological experience. Williams’ art fashions an experience that is not just visual or intellectual. The body is the source of empathy, the site of emotional and performative identity that defines the experiential encounter.

For more information, please contact info@cydoniagallery.com, call 214-296-4848, or visit www.cydoniagallery.com. The gallery’s mailing address is: 1300 Gendy Street, Fort Worth, TX 76107.