In the Studio with Brittney Leeanne Williams

INTERVIEW

Published Oct 14, 2020

Brittney Leeanne Williams in her studio

We have three bold and emotionally intense works on paper featured in This Sacred Vessel (pt.3). Could you describe the process of creating these? 

Since the end of 2018, I have prepared large groups of paper of various colors and sizes and piled them at the end of my working desk. Religiously, I come into the studio and pull from the pile and respond to the scale and color of the sheet of paper. My only parameter is to keep the red form at the center of my intentions. I view these works on paper as problem-solving for paintings; rearranging the figure in the colored field. In “Pierced” and “Sunset,” the red becomes the darkest dark and the mid-tone figures and lightest lights are orange and golden yellow.

For these works on paper, I tape off sections to create borders, squares, and masked areas. I'm really attracted to the rounded figure in relation to the rigid border or masked areas. I’ve been thinking about whether borders or frames can hold depth and distance. In some of my newer paintings, I try to explore how borders or frames, the flat tool that encases something, can hold the greatest depth in a painting.

Can you discuss the use of color, and in particular red, in your wider practice? 

Red is a key component in my work. The color red is an obsessive apparatus, a marker of urgent exhaustion. Similar to an ambulance’s siren, I want my red forms to emit a signal, to call out. I’m interested in the choreography an ambulance siren has the ability to create, a slowing down or even halting.  Rather than constructing Blackness through black skin, I use red to address the Black woman’s experience. I want this experience, which is often invisible or ignored, to pulse like the red siren, to cause viewers to halt and take notice. I am also interested in disrupting the biases we place on black skin. By painting the Black body red, the viewers’ expectations are interrupted, interpreting anew the figure carrying the Black experience.

This Sacred Vessel (pt.3) explores contemporary manifestations of the still life genre but your practice is fundamentally engaged with depicting the body. When we discussed your inclusion, you described the black bodies in your work behaving as objects or vessels. Could you elaborate on this?

I’m interested in these bodies behaving as both figures as well as objects. As figures they evoke need, flesh and humanness, as vessels, they are spaces that can hold places, the collective experience, memory, dreams and emotional landscapes. I am interested in depicting psychological and emotional states. Grief, loss, trauma, rest, relief, belonging, tiredness, and states in-between are depicted as palpable forms that inhabit the body and surround the body, blurring the boundary between the body's "inside" and "outside."

Are there African American artists who focus on experience being embodied that particularly influence your work? 

I’m looking at many remarkable makers that engage my interest in a smart, strategic, and beautiful way. Often the artists I’m most attracted to have laid groundwork to help me create a vocabulary or visual language that leaves me feeling understood rather than isolated. I tend to map my interests onto anything I’m taking in while in the studio, so often my influences are both very important and not important at all. Because I have the propensity to make connections with everything I happen to be reading, looking at, or listening to, it’s difficult to discern what is actually truly impacting and informing the work versus a coincidental similarity that is simply something to which I have a fleeting attachment. But not all of these artists are African American, but rather are brilliant humans, guides, and perhaps art parents that have made an impression on me by being much more than simply “women” or “Black,” two aspects of my identity that sit within a vast pool of a complex while also simple human. Most recently I’ve been looking at Laura Aguilar’s photographs of herself in the Mojave Desert, Louise Bourgeois’ use of the spider to address motherhood, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ricardo Martinez de Hoyos, Francisco Zuniga, reading novels by Yaa Gyasi and Brit Bennett, and playing Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” on repeat.

Finally, has the recent BLM protests impacted the production or content of your work?

I’ve been asked to speak to this question, or a version of it, by many institutions since last May. I encourage those who are interested in my thoughts on this to read my June 7th letter.  

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