ARTIST STATEMENT  by Donna Williams

Because I could not visually process anything as a whole until the age of 28 (when I got theapeutic tinted lenses), instead 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.

My painting styles are vast and many.  They are influenced by Autism and Agnosias, by Dissociative Identity Disorder and PTSD, 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. 

My dreamscapes are oneiric, and evoke the stuff of dreams.  The figures in my dreamscapes essentially reveal themselves to me.  I feel I am the instrument they use to become observable in the physical world.  They effect people deeply, some people feel they call to them, perhaps something in them.  But they are rather magical and when they enter a dreamscape it is like a dialogue between me and them as they are painted 'into life'.  

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.         

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.                

Polly (aka 'Donna Williams')