ARTIST STATEMENT  by Donna Williams

The feral child of a challenged family on the fringes of society, I was taking myself to the park at 3, had found myself another family around the corner by 8 and had left home and school completely at age 15.  From there I became educated in the many faces of social diversity as developmental disability and mental health combined with domestic prostitution, poverty, homelessness.  However, by my 20s, I had emerged as a university graduate, then a world-travelled international bestselling author, public speaker and idealist.  Tinged with the wild driving influences of Dissociative Identity Disorder, eventually, my autism became progressively dominated by my ARTism and I emerged a prolific author, composer, sculptor, artist and screenwriter.

Relatively meaning blind and largely meaning deaf until late childhood I excelled instead in the undervalued skill of sensing pattern, theme and feel; the System of Sensing.  I looked through everyone and everything, mapping patterns with my body.  I merged with colour, form and texture, resonating with these to the heights of manic oblivion, to the calm still depths of self hypnosis in which any conscious connection to my surface self no longer existed’. It is this intuitive world which laid the foundations of my ARTism.

Too crippled by Exposure Anxiety, I was able to live ARTism but not directly express it.  Unable to dare let the world connect directly, I had only drawn one repetitive picture from age 3 to age 9 (a dancer, as taught through rote). From age 9 I drew cows based on small plastic cows and did this until I was left paints by my father around age 11 (the only way I'd take things is if they were left for me, not directly given). I then produced 3 paintings and hid them in the roof void, afraid of the ability to paint which jolted me out of my preconscious state and into a terror caused by a conscious sense of my own existence - Exposure Anxiety.  Finally I took these paintings out and covered them in black paint so my own world couldn't be known or seen through this frightening thing called art.

It took until my late 20s after writing Nobody Nowhere, that someone again gave me paints, that I produced my next collection of paintings. I gave them all away and the paint ran out and I was too afraid to buy more paint and didn't know how to ask for it. It was then not until my mid 30s that my mother-in-law gave me a gift of some paints and I painted again, starting with the paintings, Next, Before and Woah. When the paints ran out, I whispered to my husband, shaking and with tears, asking finally if could he help me dare what I could not dare to do - to go into a shop and buy more paints. He did and with the mentoring of a UK art dealer, Serge Conein, I continued to paint and paint and paint some more.

My painting styles are vast and many.  They are influenced by Dissociative Identity Disorder, by Autism and Agnosias, by sensing and Taoism, by Sociology and a sense of myself as a citizen of community and of the world.  My faceless figurative works reflect my own faceblindness and capacity for sensing where people are present in so much more than their face. In stark contrast are my abstract symbolic and expressionist works where I express what it is like to think in emotions, movement, systems.

As a sculptor, I paint sculpturally; I feel and intuit form rather than judge visually and largely use my fingers more than brushes.  As a natural anthropologist I let the inner worlds of my characters speak louder than their surface realities, often without the distraction of their surroundings, facial expression, clothing or other cladding, the colours, form, texture and feel are as important as the subject.  The subtle ‘music of beingness’ within my characters speaks like the essence of dreams, an empathic language that addresses emotional consciousness and ultimately provokes questions of ourselves.    

I sculpt from feel rather than vision. My hands tell me when something is ‘done’.  Similarly, like the formless clay, my paintings often begin as a mass of abstract shapes on canvas out of which my characters appear to carve themselves then progressively call into being the surroundings from which they have emerged.  My job as the artist is to facilitate and dialogue with, rather than overly judge, criticize or interfere with, that process.  Hence my sculpting feels more like being possessed by an artistic spirit that speaks through my hands to the sculpture.        

Art, music and writing have taught me that peace is the balanced acceptance of chaos and brought into consciousness my inner Taoist.  My work derives from some strange internal dance between two equally powerful forces; passion and stillness.  In holding back from conscious judgment, something wonderful grows organically from a preconscious state and I’m along for the adventure.  What was once incomprehensible before me, finally sidesteps the directness of the conscious mind to speak evocatively more directly, more universally, to the sensual, feeling self, when fully realised in a tangible form.  In ‘beingness’ there is no judgment, only what ‘is’.                             

Welcome to the adventure….                           Donna Williams  *)