An art educator in Cumbria is part of a creative collective participating in a new high-profile American exhibition.
The exhibition, called Prima Metaria: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art, brings together an impressive list of international artists.
Robert Williams, professor of fine art at the University of Cumbria, is one such artist, and joins Tuner Prize nominees Cornelia Parker and Simon Patterson, and New York-based Matthew Barney.
The work will be exhibited at The Aldrich, one of the few independent, non-collecting contemporary art museums in the USA, and the only one in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art.
Professor Williams is also chair of the Arts Research Initiative within the Institute of Arts at the University of Cumbria and has just returned from the USA where he has been relocating and reimagining his long-standing Alchemist’s Shack project, now transferred from Pennsylvania to a purpose-built facsimile at The Aldrich.
The long-running project focuses on the creation of an alchemical laboratory housed in a vernacular building.
Professor Williams said of the project: “The Alchemist’s Shack is made up of material that reveals the lost homeland of the ex-pat, creating a nostalgic, if inaccurate, view of a past England, and impossible futures for a long-lived alchemist passing through different cultural moments, building a reality that is contingent upon the library and collection of objects contained in the shack.
“In referencing the first American alchemist, Eirinaeus Philalethes, it also offers an idealised and largely fictional American alchemical role model, existing nostalgically in a sort of eternal mythic time.
“The enterprise is very much like alchemy itself, a search for enlightenment, an enquiry that takes on many forms, and rather like alchemy, does so poetically, whilst eclectically plundering other forms of knowledge.”
Richard Klein, the exhibition’s curator, said: “It is a group exhibition that links individual works of art with an element of the periodic table which each work incorporates.
“Superficially, the exhibition’s foundation is science, but through expansive curatorial choices, the project will reveal the material bases for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter.
“Artists use specific materials for a reason, quite often for their metaphoric potential, and Prima Materia will explore hard facts as well as alchemical conjecture.”
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