Laura Cleary Williams is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the emotional and embodied language of mark-making through drawing, embroidery, and textile installation.
Her latest show, “Beyond the Veil: Memories of Space & Time”, which incorporates elements of drawing, video, and fiber installations, opens with a reception featuring the arts this Friday, October 3rd from 5pm to 8pm at Wavelength Space on McCallie Ave.
"My work traces the fragile edges of memory, time, and space. It centers on what lingers, what fades, and what insists on returning. I think of it as drawing not just on paper, but into air itself. Whether working with delicate pencil marks or suspended silk tulle and thread, I am drawn to the threshold where presence meets absence," Williams says about her new installation. "These are not illustrations of memory; they are memory embodied, folded, stitched, and layered in translucent form. The work reflects the sensation of being haunted by time in motion, of moving through grief, wonder, and stillness all at once."
Williams is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the emotional and embodied language of mark-making through drawing, embroidery, and textile installation. Working primarily in graphite, silk tulle, and thread, Williams constructs ephemeral spatial compositions that hover between presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Her practice is rooted in the belief that gesture is a form of knowledge—visceral, fragmented, and deeply human.
"Drawing has always been my first language, but over time it has outgrown its surface. I now work across materials, letting thread and fabric function as line and plane. I draw into space rather than across it. My embroidered tulle installations act like ghost drawings: light-sensitive, barely there, and always shifting. The tulle holds nothing and everything, with marks that drift, stitches that bind, and glimmers that refuse to settle," she explains. "These works focus not only on what is visible, but on what is lost in the folds. In parallel, my pencil drawings offer a quieter intimacy. Dense clusters of marks float or radiate across the page like constellations or weather patterns, mapping sensation as much as structure."
The show will be on view through November 7th with an artist talk at the closing reception. The gallery is open by-appointment throughout the duration of the exhibition.
"This work matters to me because it feels like truth. Not the kind found in a headline or a courtroom, but the kind that flickers behind your ribs when something long forgotten rises to the surface. I come from a family of lawyers, where language was built for persuasion and clarity," Williams concludes. "But I have always been drawn to the language that slips between the cracks, to what cannot quite be said but needs to be felt. These pieces are offerings to that space. They are slow, strange, and searching. They are the ghosts I carry forward and the ones I have learned to release."