Robert Williams & Jack Aylward-Williams
Professor Robert Williams is an artist & academic, he trained at Lancaster University and at Leeds University where he was a Henry Moore Scholar in Sculpture Studies in 1990. He has been leader of the Fine Art Programmes at Cumbria Institute of the Arts/University of Cumbria since 1998.
Robert’s recent practice includes a number of collaborative projects with the American artist Mark Dion in the USA and UK including The Tasting Garden at Lancaster (1998), The Tate Thames Dig (1999), Theatrum Mundi: Armarium at Jesus College, Cambridge (2001) and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2011), Mark Dion: Collaborations at Hartford CT (2003), Down the Garden Path: Artists Gardens After Modernism at the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2005) and a series of prints made with Dion at Cumbria Institute of the Arts (University of Cumbria) which formed part of the London Underground Art Project associated with Dion’s Microcosmographia at the South London Art Gallery.
Their latest work together,
An Ordinall of Alchimy (2010) was commissioned by Cabinet Magazine and collaborated with Fellows from the Mildred’s Lane Project (MLP) in Pennsylvania.
Jack Aylward-Williams, the son of Robert Williams & Gina Aylward was born on Christmas Day 1998. His current interests include natural history collecting, particularly insects & other invertebrates, Tudor history, experimental chemistry, conservation and The Beano.
Robert & Jack’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, film-making & writing, and includes explorations of epistemology and systems of knowledge from the hermetic to the scientific - sources for the work are drawn from subjects as diverse as natural history, archaeology, anthropology, myth and legend.
Robert & Jack’s recent collaborations include the year long Thesaurus Scienta Lancastriae (2004-2005) at Lancaster UK; the film Procession (2005) for the Blind Pond Film Festival at Narrowsburg NY, USA; and Virga et Lapilla, which engages with archaeology in the exhibition Stones, Circles, Landscape & Art curated by archaeologist Aaron Watson at Penrith Museum, Cumbria UK (2006).
Robert & Jack have recently worked on projects about The Underworld and Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. Their latest work, Disjecta Fragmen Communitis (2011) was shown in Trial & Retrieval at the World of Glass Museum on Merseyside, UK.
