BIO / ARTIST STATEMENT
Tish Williams lives and creates in the city where she was born, Wilmington, Delaware. In 2006, she fully invested her art into the fiber form and uses space as a tool in her creative process. She completed her BFA at the University of Delaware in 2022 and is the Program Director of the Urban Artist Exchange Artist Studios as well as a United Methodist Pastor.
Art and Spiritual Care are important partners in the formation of self and spiritual disciplines such as meditation, rest, prayer and other lanes to connect with higher thoughts.
If you are interested in group painting or art experiences for your small group or conference, please email sadiddyhippie.com@gmail.com for more information.
“Reflective practice can be defined as the systematic use of reflection to reach greater self-understanding by relating experiences, goals, motivation, and intentions to action (Klein, 2003).”
- Campbell, Laurel H. “Spiritual Reflective Practice in Preservice Art Education.” Studies in Art Education 47, no. 1 (October 1, 2005): 51–69
ARTIST STATEMENT
Since 1999, I have been working with gender and domestic themes and how these issues affect place and time. My earlier work aesthetic included colors and typography reminiscent of the 1950s and early 1960s. I examined space and texture through constructed textiles and how they fit into a space. Since then, I have explored questions concerning who I am as an artist, woman, ex-wife, and mother. This expanded my art to performance and facilitation of artistic experiences that the viewer could participate in. Most were solo works that explained my experience as a Black woman except for the collaborative piece “Head vs Heart” also known as “TishAmy.” In this piece, the shared experience of womanhood was presented by a string connecting myself and artist Amy R Craig. We would go through the process of untying each other and breaking free from the multi-colored yarn that restrained us. Your head space ties itself to your heart space but logic and emotion can be separated. Performances became a main point of my study in the latter years with the most recent being “Bitch”. This video performance examines code switching and the concept of place.
My thoughts on gender and binary constructs have changed since I first started examining my place in the world. Now, not only am I looking at how others perceive those gender categories but how do I navigate them. The idea is to slightly twist domesticity, womanhood, and race to evoke a reaction from the viewer that is both familiar and disturbing to produce thought. Three artists that inspire me are Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Ida Applebrooge. All three of these women work with time and place. In my work, I want to highlight historical events that may or may not have happened with wit and sometimes absurdity. I find it to be a comfortable way to create, and this is what I hope to project from my body of work.
Dyes move the color theory and love of process in my work. This is evident in the piece “Alchemy Triptych.” Planned or unplanned, there were steps to create the whole work. Synthetic dyes were used to produce a swampy environment on silk. A faint cityscape is seen through the red handprints. Color and texture are important to the feeling of my pieces. Working with fiber as material and a base of connotation, I emphasize concept and craft in my work. An example of this is “28 Lloyd St.” where I built a solid foundation in the technique of quilt making to create a full idea that goes beyond the execution of the piece. This is so the viewer can go further into the meaning while still appreciating the process it took to produce the piece. Material is also important to my ideas. Again, color, visual and tactile texture plays a significant role in this piece. The visual texture of the map of my birthplace and the velvet material makes me think of warmth, home, and place. The materials used in each of my pieces carry the concept for the viewer to call on their individual memories. Texture and pattern or lack of can alter the emotions and thought process of the viewer. From wood or steel-based fiber work to surface, mass, containment, and performance, my work lives to make experiences.