SAM WILLIAMS_HALF-SWALLOWED_2024_INSTALLATION IMAGES
HALF-SWALLOWED: A response by Rebecca Jagoe
OPENING – 12 DECEMBER 2024, 6PM / ABINGDON STUDIOS PROJECT SPACE
HALF-SWALLOWED
My alarm sounds faintly from my phone. A soft pulsation of pressure around my legs, a weird sucking at the hips. Waking from a particularly bad-night’s-sleep, a large fish has appeared around my lower body, lips around my waist. Half-swallowed yet entirely undigested. I am not dreaming (the fish indicates this, meeting my gaze with its eyes of moist marble). I’m still me, I think to myself. But I’m also it. Or, rather, the fish and I are one, a hybrid thing. My bedsheets are salty and wet.
Through a collection of spoken and written text, imagery and costume, HALF-SWALLOWED presents fragments from a scenario in which a person finds themself part-way consumed by a large Fish. Childhood memories of playing on the seashore; watery mythological creatures; hoax Mermaids and the surprisingly wet feeling of an interspecies connection are unpacked in a slippery series of fragmented thoughts. The exhibition is the latest manifestation of ongoing research and writing into multispecies entanglements, climate precarity and more-than-human survival that permeates Williams’s practice. HALF-SWALLOWED is a response to growing up on the border of land and water and spending time in Blackpool, as well as the appearance of the mermaid and other forms of human-fish hybrids that appear in both local and global folk tales.
The unstable landscape of the tidal Zone embraces the humans and non-humans who are affected by the flow between coast and city, and offers the chance to explore the space between work and leisure, land and water, night and day. Through sound, video and collage I plan to connect with those who work between the land and water (whether that is on the pier; fishing; beach-combing; swimming; scientific research; marine life; driftwood; mermaids) or who occupy the coastal landscape in different ways during the day and night (drag performers; night-shift workers; seaweed; the moon). Those shimmering beings you can’t quite pin down, whose appearance or form changes during these moments.
Sam Williams is an artist with a research based practice, who’s work intertwines moving-image, collage, installation, choreography, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements, ecological systems, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living.
Sam is based in London where he is a resident at Somerset House Studios. He has presented work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Arnolfini, Siobhan Davies Dance, Somerset House, Tate Britain (UK), She Will (Norway); Röda Sten (Sweden); Kino Arsenal, Akademie der Kunst, Tanzhalle Wisenberg and B3 Biennale (Germany). Sam has been artist in residence at Rupert (Lithuania, 2022), Hospitalfield (Scotland, 2021), PRAKSIS (Oslo, 2018) and Cite Internationale des Arts (France, 2015).
WORK/LEISURE 