Cat Gonzales
Photography & Social Media Editor
“Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination” opened to the Butler campus Monday, Aug. 27 – Friday, Sept. 21. Sandra Williams, the artist whose work can be found at the E.B. White Art Gallery, has been exhibiting nationally since she was about 23 years old. Her pieces are based on what she has seen in different environments. She explains the different folk tales by creating a visual that others are usually taught to steer away from.
“I did an art regency in the Amazon in the Tomb Pottery region about four years ago and so that is what some of the paintings are about,” Williams, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said. “If you look at them, you can see the nature slowly disappearing in one of the last images. Like there’s a truck on the highway and those pieces actually have to do with this very old age notion of the sublime or unsparing nature but I think [that] the people think nature is infinite and it’s not. It is very finite. It’s about the bucolic landscapes slowly being replaced.”
In addition to the paintings, papercut pieces were used in the E.B. White Art Gallery.
“The papercut pieces were number one an effort to use a material that is environmentally friendly…they go against what you [are] taught in art school like were steered away from using text, and we were steered away from working illiterately which those are defiantly illustrative files,” Williams said.
Even though papercut pieces are environmentally healthy, the last pieces show nature’s counter attack.
“I am originally from Cleveland, Ohio, so the other piece is about the subterminal fire and that’s a true story,” Williams said. “That has been burning in southern Ohio for 140 years as well there are also towns in Pennsylvania. So, the story is one of striking miners in the 1880’s and that relationship about nature thinking of a moment of anger that they will show that company and then they destroy their livelihood and town.”
Her inspiration comes from the actual stories of the folk tales and doing her research from places that she has traveled too.
“When I travel, you really don’t know what the place is like,” Williams said. “You can do all the research that you want, but as far back as you can trace my work, it been all about the story.”
Williams also provided some words of inspiration for anyone hoping to show their art one day.
“You have to have a thick skin,” Williams said. “For every yes, there will be 10 nos. But also, you have to be two of the three things. You have to be polite to work with, you should always be on time and you should be fabulously talented and as long as you have two of those three things you usually do pretty well.”