Alys Williams, Transitory Sites (2010)

Medium: Video Painting, Projection, Color and no sound

Dimensions: 33 Scapes | Duration: 3 hourw, 2 min., 40 sec.

Collection: Video Painting Solo Series

Edition of 7

Reference: VPSS-AWTS10

Transitory Sites is a series of video paintings by British artist Alys Williams which were shot in England, Sicily and the South of France.

Transitory Sites explores the boundary between the built and natural environment. The series of works presents this boundary as a tense and fragile equilibrium between the two competing forces which encourages the viewer to consider the long term ephemerality of the built environment. Seemingly solid structures are poised, balanced and submerged within landscapes that existed long before them and will be there long after.

Water features strongly within the collection, whether purposefully contained and collected (Behind Bars) or collecting in between the built spaces (Chimney). Whilst Room with a Sea captures the power of nature that follows no man made rules, filling voids that have been vacated. These glimpses of the ever changing flow of nature and the patterns formed encourage the viewer to stop and immerse themselves within its mesmerizing and consistent qualities.

Whilst commentators claim each technological advance as a sign of our mastery over nature, Williams succeeds in delicately portraying the natural world as a patient, steady and unyieldingly permanent force. The absence of human inhabitation saturates the works adding to the forlorn drama of these forgotten spaces and allowing the slow and quiet battle between leaf and lintel, sea and stone to play out in isolation. One exception is the ethereal Garden Chair, the only piece within the series to feature a human presence, yet even this self portrait is expressed as no more than a ghostly shadow which slowly drifts out of the frame leaving another heavy silence.


Click here to view Alys Williams' Artist Page & Biography.