Sketchbook
Untitled drawings (2008) by Adam Williams; ink on paper, various dimensions. Courtesy the artist
Adam Williams’s ceramics create a sort of wry tension through their combination of classic forms and techniques with witty, disturbing, or occasionally salacious decorations drawn directly onto their glaze. In a simple bowl, otherwise suitable for eating cornflakes, a marksman takes aim with his pistol; turn it over to reveal an apple balancing on a nervous head. A stoneware vase titled The Graduate (2009) depicts a scene of uneasy seduction, a play on the famous image of Anne Bancroft pulling on her stockings in the poster for the Mike Nichols film. Nearby, a gossiping crowd engages in a round of Chinese whispers, and three comets loom overhead. Another vase, All in a Day’s Work (2009), hints at age-old family drama: a maternal figure giving birth, a father perched atop a mound of bodies, a house of cards.
His ink drawings on paper are sometimes preparatory sketches for Williams’s ceramic pieces, sometimes a journal of visual ideas in the process of being thought out, and sometimes complete works in their own right. Their recurring images — human figures taking flight, bent under vast burdens, Atlas-style, or engaged in tasks both mysterious and mundane — are small meditations on every artist’s negotiations with creativity and confidence.
Untitled drawings (2008) by Adam Williams; ink on paper, various dimensions. Courtesy the artist
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The Caribbean Review of Books, May 2009
Adam Williams is a Trinidadian artist who works primarily in ceramics. He has trained at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and is currently a student at UWI St Augustine’s Centre for Creative and Festival Arts.
