Rachel Eulena Williams

A connecting tissue runs through each of Williams’ sculptural paintings. On the physical end, ropes keep her cuts of canvases and plethora of fabrics intact within wooden panels; metaphorically, however, a sense of togetherness of disparate colors and textures inhabits her detailed compositions. Between an engineered precariousness and energetic solidity, Williams’ mixed-media juxtapositions both monumentalize and mystify process—they yearn for closer inspections that brim with material discoveries. 

“The rope is necessary for holding a moment,” she says at her Brooklyn studio, where stacks of canvases and fabrics join rolls of cotton strings and piled tools. A sewing machine overlooks the gray-hued industrial Bushwick cityscape; color dominates the workspace inside, with pieces of textile laid over a large table next to a book full of sketches. Traits from various gestures of making—painting, cutting, drawing, sewing, screwing, gluing—linger. “This is also a physical act,” adds Williams about the tactile unity she concocts, “because each rope is a line that marks the movement of the body.” Both a utilitarian tool and a bodily chronicler, the thick cotton string journeys through acrylic-painted canvases, occasionally loose and in other times, tightened—along the way, patterned textiles and even pieces of hammocks join. 

Williams dissects each material through a surgeon-like precision and merges with a curious whimsy. In Red, Invisible, Blues (2022), a lush landscape is deconstructed into a horizontal dreamscape, a blue-washed cinemascope of botanical bloom and a quiet dawn. The artist debuted the work last year in Hauser & Wirth’s Legacy Russell-curated group exhibition The New Bend, which featured contemporary artists exploring the legacy of Alabama’s 19th-century Gee’s Bend quilters. The invitation to ponder on the social reflections of the Black women-led craft movement today inspired her to also create a swing, titled Swing in Protective Style (2023). “I wanted to investigate our bodily relationship to a painting,” she explains, “as well as the connotations of hair and braiding.” Vertical knots of thick ropes lifted the wooden swing; the audience assumed a kinetic experience with the inherently static nature of the painting in front of them. A sensory back-and-forth was akin to a dance, with layered histories awaiting to be plunged into and swayed back out of. “A work is both active and static,” thinks Williams, “and a dynamic experience held by ropes can replicate both.”

Tactility and depth inform a practice invested in the decision as much as chance, yielding kaleidoscopic optics and geometric formations. Tension and weightlessness occupy equal estates across positive and negative spaces; ropes sprawl over generous color palettes and splice dense textures. 

The 33-year-old artist’s 2023 solo exhibition, Hair and Body, at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland featured circular or rectangular paintings. They outlined washes of bright colors that blossomed into depth and texture upon nearing. Through lines drawn by ropes, she wove networks of harmony, of immediate tangibility and of fleeting studio time. Physicality was also an invitation rendered firsthand in her first institutional exhibition. Another swing was installed in front of the show’s largest painting, titled Pistillate (2023), which embodied a budding arrangement of petal-shaped canvases exploding into a flower. A suspended painting on a curtain contained small size circular canvases, joined together with strings—the draping occupied the middle of the space as a multicolor accent of experimentation. “I was trying to understand the difference between what painting and sculpture can do.” For Williams, conceptualizing the show was “one of the most mental exercises I found myself in,” and it allowed her to approach, “the grand idea of an exhibition,” rather than focusing on artworks as singular entities. The possibility to build an overall togetherness through an expansive installation was “a burst of energy.” She admits that closing the show at the end of last year meant entering the studio again to re-collect that dispersed energy. 

<Read the full essay from Issue Seven>