Suzanne Williams

Suzanne Williams is a social anthropologist and a professional consultant in international development and humanitarian assistance and policy.  She is currently working freelance with non-govenmental and international organisations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International and the United Nations.

She has 30 years’ experience in management of large social development programmes; writing, training and facilitation; evaluation and review; global policy advice and advocacy related to gender, human rights, peace and conflict, humanitarian intervention and violence against women.

'Within and encompassing my profession I am an interdisciplinary artist, bringing my creativity to bear on all my work. I work with people and ideas, trying to bring new ways of thinking into institutions and policies. In recent years, I have found new ways of understanding and communicating the world with the language and insights of social sculpture.

Social sculpture is on one level about concern with the state of the world, with people and the planet, and a kind of activism. In this, it has much in common with interventionist, environmental, and political art in the public domain. On another level, however, it is about hidden, subtle processes, reaching into human consciousness and the psyche. It proposes a more intimate kind of relationship between the self and others, and the self and the world.

Somewhere in the meeting of these two kinds of active processes is the possibility of alchemical change, of transformation, in individuals within human society and in the living universe. Bringing this potential for change into form is the role of the artist – or the social sculptor – in ways which can be shared and communicated, and experienced and felt by others.

Since the beginning of 2007, the material, the substance, which has been the carrier of my concerns with displacement, has been sand. Sand is a transgressive substance which respects neither boundaries, nor borders. Ancient, irreverant, mobile, disturbing, it goes everywhere, without a passport. Sand is in my own history, and my psyche. Sand is also the medium for healing, used in Jungian psychotherapy.

My work for the Social Sculpture MA Festival in September 2007, a piece called “Breakfast in Time”, explored some of these elements.  ‘Breakfast in Time’ created a harmonious sand-filled space set up like a café, with sand-covered tables and chairs and the ambiguous light between day and night. Audiences engaged with the artist, and with each other, and were enabled to open up to reflect on the way in which they began their day, to how they placed themselves in the transition from sleep to action in the world. Their reflections, captured in small ‘thought books’ and recordings, traversed time and space and memory, expanding infinitely outwards from the pools of light on the sand tables in the room'.