Tess Williams is a London based artist specialising in painting and painting installation. She is currently at Central Saint Martins where she will complete her MA Fine Art in June 2015. She has exhibited widely across London at galleries including The Griffin Gallery, Studio 1.1, Schwartz Gallery and recently had a solo show at Chelsea College of Art. In 2014 Tess was chosen to be part of UK Young Artists where she exhibited in Leicester at Two Queens Gallery. Here she delves into her work process…

M.M.B., 2015

At the moment my work exists within the boundaries of traditional / deconstructed painting, installation and large-scale collage; exploring where one discipline ends and the next begins.

I am first and foremost concerned with the sensual immediacy of paint and its interaction with the porous materials that I chose to apply it to. My work explores the unprimed materiality of these textiles and how they can be enhanced, altered or adapted by paint. I never prime my materials in order to leave as much amount of absorption as possible. Meaning that the material and the paint become one, rather than the paint just lying on top of a surface, as with many primed paintings. The materiality of the work as a whole is important to me, allowing its evocative power to resonate.

I am also engaging with how folds, creases and movement within the materials can act as a form of mark making, creating shadows, lines and shapes, whilst adding new tones to the colours of the paint. I also explore the way folds introduce both inside and outside, in front and behind, what this evokes, compared with the emphasis on surface alone of traditional painting. Much of my work is questioning the role of the wooden stretcher within my work and what importance it plays. It adds a familiar structure for me to work with but can also hinder my freedom when making.

Outside In, 2015

Now you see me, 2015

I prefer to be surrounded by rich and absorbent visual stimuli in order to add depth and balance to what I perceive to be a world saturated with screen-based imagery.  I tend to disconnect from flat shiny impenetrable metals/plastic surfaces, and highly photoshopped or screen-based imagery. It is also because I cannot sense the physical touch that I veer away from this type of work. For me, the physical link between artist and viewer is important.

My reason for making the work I do is my reaction to the constant desire I have to produce things that don’t already exist. It is my way of working through everything I see and experience in daily life. It is how I process my ‘thinking’ and get the inside out. I want to make things that feel ‘right’ to me, in order to counteract all the things I see around me every day that seem so aesthetically wrong. ‘Right’ meaning imperfectly perfect and visually satisfying, not just ‘correct’.

Pocket, 2015

T.T.W., 2014

Collections of my visual memories and imprints coalesce into single paintings. These visual memories are documented by my support work of collage, photography and print. This is becoming an increasingly important way of sustaining the visual input into my practice and solidifying the feed of information, which I then translate into the final pieces.

I aim to create work that engages with the space it is placed in. Creating a dialogue between the install space and the work; the wall and the materiality of the painting.
Total immersion in a space/artwork is enveloping and grounding, and I find this to be one of the most engaging physical experiences as a viewer.

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Introducing a social media strategy is an easy win for arts marketeers. Do away with print – save time, hassle and the environment, with the added bonus of being the revolutionary who drags everyone into the 21st Century.

In theory, it sounds great. As black and white as a halftone dot. Except this whole trade-off between design and print, and social media, is a bit of a misnomer. But let’s compare them for a moment:

Print has been around for a long, long time. For the sake of argument lets pick out a landmark year – 1450 – when Gutenburg started getting his fingers inky doing some nice brochures for the Lord. That’s 560 years. Twitter? 4 years. [I’m aware social media was around a bit before that, but then I’m not counting back to The Dead Sea Scrolls, God’s innovative but ill-fated roll-folded direct marketing campaign].

Right now there’s a lot of ‘what’s next?’ questions and prophesizing, and Web 3.0 chin stroking, but no-one really knows for sure where this is all heading. We can see some platforms are already dying (Bebo is the latest casualty, MySpace a hollow Murdoch shell of it’s innovative heyday). Point being, just because this new stuff is great – and we should all embrace it – we shouldn’t chuck out all the brilliant old stuff. So, here’s my 4 part plea to the design/print naysayers…
First off, adopting Social Media shouldn’t be about giving design a bodyswerve. Effective social media marketing is designed – it’s a nuanced combination of images and text just like anything you put on paper, and needs to be considered in the same way.

Secondly, Social Media shouldn’t be thought of as a cheap alternative to design for print – if anything social media takes more time – once you’ve created something it’s only the beginning of a journey that requires constant feeding, monitoring and interaction.

Third, if we’re talking solely about arts marketing, then surely we’re still appealing at core to a visual culture that places intricates values on form, content and aesthetics? Rather than killing off printed material, social media essentially presents an opportunity to focus on making smaller runs of better print. As a designer I take little joy in squeezing on more and more information that could be communicated on a website, or sending out large runs of cheap, digitally printed flyers. I’m a fully paid-up stock sniffing, type fetishising, paper grammage nerd, so I’m biased… but when you are communicating something as potentially complex as artists’s work, combined with the values of a gallery, isn’t it worth the effort to attempt to represent that properly?

Most importantly, design and print is a hugely important part of visual culture, and works in tandem with visual art. A great example of this is Neil McGuire’s piece I wrote about a few weeks ago that was produced for the ECA Masters show and in itself became part of the exhibition.

There must be more examples, and better arguments. Am I preaching to the converted, or is print pulped?

Image: Invite for Baldvin Ringsted, +44 141 Gallery by The Press – Emlyn Firth/Edwin Pickstone