Eve of destruction: the world of Evelyn Williams

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Evelyn Williams’ work is uncompromising and demanding but revelatory, as Julian Freeman reveals

A Life’s Work: The Art of Evelyn Williams assembled by Anthony Perry with Cally Spooner

Evelyn Williams died in 2012, aged 83: this sumptuous and unsettling book is an attempt to introduce to her work a greater understanding, and, perhaps, acceptance of it, and was published to coincide with a recent exhibition of Williams’ work at Martin Tinney, Cardiff. In its visionary intensity the book should appeal to many students working across fine art, 3D and sculpture, but blanket accord seems unlikely.

Though they have been intrinsic to all her work for decades, Williams’ themes may remain too uncompromising and her style sometimes too direct for many. The same may be true for a more generalist audience, where only the most open-minded will also be the best able to face the candour of her vision. In truth, it is hard to adequately describe or characterize her output, shown here in superb detail, even though the book’s many contributors do a great deal to offer readers insightful, world’s-eye views of this highly original artist.

Not a household name, Evelyn Williams was a Londoner, born in 1929, and, for much of her career, best known in the west of England and Wales. A painter–sculptor, she was a prize-winning student at the Royal College, and in 1961 won the John Moores prize for sculpture. The 1960s and ’70s were comparatively lean years, in which divorce, re-marriage and motherhood interrupted the business of exhibiting, but the end of the ’70s signalled a return to a more public life and, from then until her death, Williams showed regularly, in venues of repute in the west of England, the Midlands and Wales.

For those who do not know her work, or know little of it, her wax figures, large reliefs and paintings and drawings are revelatory in their resonance: they are always surprising, electrical, confrontational, and each is capable of delivering an emotional bushwhacking, even here in reproduction, where the book often reduces the sizes of originals by some margin.

The ways in which A Life’s Work inculcates an appreciation of Williams’ art are much less those of a monograph (though there is no doubt of their rigid focus), and much more that of a combination of festschrift (albeit that such books are usually produced to honour the living) and apologia. There is a strong sense of ‘This Is Your Life’, of fly-on-the-wall activity, through which Williams’ life and work are treated to a composite of succinct, analytical appreciations, anecdotes and responses, by a body of writers providing a very wide range of highly focused views: commentaries on the powerful pictorial statements presented here, over a lifetime of creativity.

Some contributors are known, locally, or nationally across the UK, or both; others are amongst Williams’ closest friends and family and, perhaps most persuasively, those who bought her work, and who regard it daily in their homes. The latter texts are sometimes very short, sometimes longer appreciations. It is amongst these statements that readers will find the strongest responses. Amongst them is a 1999 review by the novelist Fay Weldon, in which the author speaks of Williams ‘taking on herself the suffering of the world’.

To say that this is surely an understatement is no exaggeration, for the book presents numerous images almost unprecedented in their intensity, as responses to life’s deepest, most demanding experiences, and as commentaries of some intensity on very much more than the ‘human condition’. These are not homely images, by any stretch of the imagination, and their re-presentation in this unusual book gives them a stark authority, and one unlikely to find an equal in much recent activity.

A Life’s Work: The Art of Evelyn Williams, assembled by Anthony Perry with Cally Spooner, is published by Sansom & Co. 288pp., fully illustrated in colour, £35.00 (hbK). ISBN 978 1 908326 71 3