Penzance, Cornwall, UK
Can we live without touch? In her insistently handmade artist books and prints, Ros Williams both enacts and illustrates attempts at contact — between a man and a dog lost together on an island, angels tumbling through the air, people stranded atop towers separated by a meandering river, a woman and the birds she is either trying to catch or set free. That none of these creatures actually succeeds in joining with the other — at least not in the moment of their existence Williams has chosen to frame — colors their monochromatic black ink a shade melancholic. The exception that makes that heartbreaking rule is an untitled etching, whose pacifically contented occupant benefits from the pair of arms that grow out her heart-shaped head, complete with soft hands to embrace her own shoulders.
—Lori Waxman