Hannah Williams Review

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“Tourist in My Own Country”
19th October - 23rd October

Review by Meg Voce
@meg_ggii

Rather than presenting a fixed idea of heritage or home, the work holds the uncertainty of being between places. Peru is simultaneously inherited, remembered, visited and discovered. I explore what it means to encounter a place as both home and elsewhere: to be, in some sense, a tourist in my own country.
Hannah Williams

In her LAB Gallery exhibition, Hannah Williams presents the quietly familiar as having the capacity to always be moving; uprooted and transplanted, shipwrecked somewhere else to begin again. Against the white walls of the LAB gallery, a series of wooden planks and boards place a group of surfaces in proximity to one another, each projecting an image. Each piece frames the unfamiliar, showing us its vulnerable side, forcing us to share space with these portals into these spaces which simultaneously seem to invite us in and refute our wanting to get close to them. Photographs that Williams has taken from her summer spent in Peru have been printed onto pieces of wood—producing photographic objects of fragmentary moments, made permanent as a series of visual transcriptions. The grain of the wood itself feels significant to this (re)presentation of each image. The compositions appear to be in flux, unstable and shifting, as if the grain of the wood was itself responsible for a glitch in the translation. I’m reminded of the shaky frames and the fuzzy details of home videos. Their instability seems to speak aptly to memory and generational experience; distortion, in any form, is part of what it means to sit with memories that have been passed to you. They squeeze themselves next to your own personal experience. These two are not strangers, but they know nothing about one another either. In the exhibition, scenes of intense intimacy play out in front of us, unfolding as a series of experiences that could not be fully understood. They necessitate being revisited and revised, picked over in an attempt to recuperate more of the essence of that been-and-gone moment.

Chasing ghosts and shadows.

Growing up in London with a Peruvian mother and an English father, Peru as both site and subject is important to Williams’ investigation of her lived experience in a cultural in-between place. The photographs that the artist has worked with for this exhibition came out of an extended period of time spent in this almost-home, venturing beyond Peru’s capital, Lima, to experience the landscapes of Muquiyauyo, Jauja, the birthplace of her grandmother. These sites hold strong familial resonances laid out and buried deep in foreign unknown geographies.

To know of something, to feel part of it, to construct your self-image seeing this to be crucial to its authenticity, and to have lived experience which fractures the familiar from the foreign, produces a chasm between reality and the imagined. A juncture, or duality of selves emerges. Williams’ photographs, taken initially as a way of memory keeping and documentation, serve as a source of comfort and truthfulness and an ongoing starting point for curious, compassionate investigation. The viewer is invited into the artist’s perspective and place as she attempts to situate herself within the geographies of her own cultural heritage. This autobiographical quality shows strongly in the work; we are presented with

snapshots, fleeting scenes of prolonged experiences and interactions with Williams’ own unique version of the Peruvian landscape.

A topography of lived experience allows us to move through an autobiographical landscape. Each print presents us with a slightly different horizon line, and the shifting position of each wooden board produces a series of different levels. We are forced to step forward, move back, shift our gaze up or down—each image demands a different proximity of us. We are strongly aware of our own position in relation to it. Confronted by figures and animals enacting gestures, there are certain moments where we feel more like a voyeur than a participant in the scene itself. A familial outsider. This duality feels important to how the artist is navigating her own shifting proximity to memory, experience and place. When lost within the creative process in the studio, returning to these photographs became the truthful anchor points for Williams’ to mine themes that she is constantly in dialogue with, attempting to pin down the most honest parts of these documented moments.

In Roland Barthe’s text Camera Lucida (1980), he describes the “punctum” as the force that attracts the viewer towards a certain aspect of an image, a detail which has the capacity to proliferate the viewer’s own reality, leave behind a puncture mark, the feeling of having been pricked. A bruise starts to bloom quietly below the surface, opening out and expanding, this lasting impression from having been touched by something without ever realising it was there. Through Williams’ methodology of being guided by material, she has been able to ‘look back at the small or big parts of herself against the exhibition space; standing back and watching it piece together.’ This act of stepping away from the work, viewing her own position from outside of herself, reproduces a distance akin to living in a cultural commonground or multiplicity—producing a space in which Williams’ could see herself and feel seen through the images that speak honestly of her own experiences, the places that she considers home.

The artist’s investigation into Inca Civilisation and other Peruvian Indigenous cultures and beliefs places her methodology in dialogue with Mother Earth practices. These practices feel inherently of the landscape and of the understanding that land is sacred. Considering what we should take and what we should give back, each interaction with a natural material is a negotiation in the artist’s method. Using repurposed industrial wooden boards, branches, soil, fibres and food, the material guides the methodology and language that Williams’ uses in an attempt to translate her memory. This visual language is unabashful, each image shows itself boldly, takes up space and holds it. It does not deny itself the right to be seen. Experimenting with wood grains and photo editing processes, the preliminary stage develops focused versions of the artist’s initial photographs, reflecting her own perspective. Leaving a mark of her revisit.

The exhibition is contributing towards the artist’s ongoing, ‘bigger’ experience of self discovery and how that can manifest through an artistic methodology. The work is only considered resolved when ‘the vibrancy and the earthly attachment’, and outlook she has on her Peruvian heritage, shows in the work. Sitting somewhere in the middle of the familial experience, enfolded in these pieces are the things that can appear or feel familiar from the outside without fully being understood. Williams is engaged in a cross-cultural dialogue with herself and past and present versions of Peru, haunted by friendly ghosts, outside of one version of home to find familiar resonances in another. By opening up her personal memory to the consciousness of the viewer there is an opportunity for threads of shared experience to bleed out of the LAB, revealing the knots that bind all of our lives when it comes to navigating and interacting with familial narratives. Williams’ exhibition makes us ask ourselves what defines home, how we are able to live with an alternative version of ourselves, someone simultaneously recognisable and a complete unknown.

Darrel doesn’t miss Belfast. I think I miss it for him.

Recently I asked my Father if he ever grieves for the life he didn’t live in Belfast. He left in 1973, born on the coattails of 1972, what would later be referred to as “the bloody year”. I can’t begin to imagine what Belfast must have been like at that time. Sometimes, today, it feels like it's that version of Belfast that lives with us—its the one where the memories got made.

My father traded a Belfast childhood for Cheshire Fields and farmhand work—chasing pigs and being chased by them in equal measure.

He tells me staunchly “No”—that he can’t miss what he doesn’t remember. On this I have to disagree with him, for he carries the traces of a childhood not spent there—a place that saw him and maybe calls softly to him in dreams he doesn’t admit to having. I would be quick to believe him, I’ve dreamt of the shades of yellow and green in Cheshire fields more times than I would care to admit too.

So, I’m left to wonder if a part of him does long for it. For everything he doesn’t know but has been told about over the years, could still be told about when his cousins come to town. The home he has inherited is one he has never known— I have no photos of him against that city backdrop, and everything loaded into that place, which feels so much a part of my own heritage too. Look but you can’t touch— it's an apt way of thinking about what it means to live with knots in the family.

Him and I share the same copper roots, freckles and pale skin. The blood in his veins flowed while he was in Belfast first, whether he likes it or not, and his eyes are still that motley shade of green, hazel and amber—like the colour of the trees, now that I think about it, which are on the turn in Dundonald as we speak.

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