Join us for a powerful episode with visual artist Laura Cleary Williams. We engage in an honest conversation about art, mental health, and the role of vulnerability in our creative work.
Trigger Warning: This episode includes a discussion about suicide. If you are feeling suicidal, thinking about hurting yourself, or are concerned that someone you know may be in danger of hurting himself or herself, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
Here’s what we discuss:
1. Laura’s experience as a printmaker and the ways in which printmaking continues to influence her work today.
2. Why Laura’s first love will always be drawing, and the ways in which she expresses herself through mark-making on paper.
3. Laura’s journey with mental health and the life-changing experience that profoundly impacted her both personally and creatively.
4. The importance of community and cultivating connections with fellow artists.
About Laura -
Williams’s abstract spaces are an ode to an imperfect language. Through motion, she makes marks that translate thought - subconscious – a viscerally understood language. Williams works from her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2009, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Next, Williams received a full scholarship to complete her Master's in Printmaking in 2012 at SCAD-Atlanta.
Williams worked at SCAD‘s Southeastern Center for Printmaking. There, she worked on an ambitious print collection with Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond. Initially working as an assistant printer, Williams was indispensable to the project and was promoted to assistant project manager. On the heels of this project, Williams founded, managed, and co-owned Straw Hat Press, which specialized in fine art publishing and contract printing. As Straw Hat flourished, Williams realized that despite her success in printmaking, she would always be devoted to her love of drawing. Subsequently, she left Atlanta and returned to her hometown to pursue her career as a gallery artist, where her career soared.
In 2022 and 2023, Williams exhibited with PXP Contemporary, Viridian Artists, Van Der Plas Gallery, and the New York Equity Association in NYC. She was the first exhibition and solo at Good Art Co. in South Carolina. She was an artist in residence with Carrie Able Gallery and asked to return for a solo exhibition in the Spring of 2024, when she will also be an artist in residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France.