BEN CULLEN WILLIAMS

About

Ben Cullen Williams is a London based artist, whose practice consists of sculptures, installations, photography and video. In his work, Williams explores humankind’s relationship to the world in a rapidly changing environment; he focuses on the intersection between space, technology and landscape. He investigates how related spatial typologies can be understood as a physical manifestation of our own human condition. He draws on a range of fabrication processes from physical to digital to understand our changing relationship to the material world. Having initially studied architecture, prior to studying sculpture, his practice is underpinned by a long standing investigation into how we live, and how those environments shape us.

His work has been shown internationally in a range of spaces, galleries and environments as well as collaborating with a range of different disciplines and fields; Musée d’arts de Nantes, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; The Living Archive: An Ai Performance experiment, Saddler’s Wells; Autobiography, Covent Garden, Truman Brewery; Transition, The Bolshoi Theatre; Autobiography, Monaco UBP, Moscow; Arcus, amongst others. He has collaborated with Wayne McGregor, Marina Abramović, Gaika, Polar Explorer Robert Swan and Google Arts and Culture and MIT. His projects have won and been short and longlisted for a number of awards including a D&AD Yellow pencil (2018), RIBA award (2012) (2011), Aesthetica art Prize.

Williams lectures internationally and has written for a number of publications. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Art. He is currently an associate Lecturer at the University of Arts, London.

Statement

The world we inhabit is changing rapidly, within both the built and non-built environments, highlighting the familiar and creating the unfamiliar. Technology is surging forwards bringing new challenges in our ability to dwell and locate ourselves within these shifting landscapes. Our traditional architectural and spatial markers are loosening and changing value as they are now part of a wider constellation of physical and digital environments, with digital space as real as the physical. Within this context our relationship to hidden technological systems, to spatial systems and value systems is constantly under review, while the totality can be seen as being in a constant state of transition and uncertainty, existing in the in-between, on a constant threshold. His questioning of the lived world stems from an architectural background, aiming to understand and place order into the world from apparent disorder. As a result, his work manifests as fragments, studies and models of exploration which form new speculative realities. Much of his practice is the result of collaborative endeavours, working on a project by project basis. The result being a body of work that spans photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance that exists within the intersection of technology, space and landscape. Yet, the built and non-built cannot be explored deeply if the self is absent, as this taps into our deeper understanding of what it is to be human, a locating of the self within an environment.