SOFT explores the idea of comfort - its capacity to soothe, but also to seduce or suffocate - and the allure of relinquishing agency in return for a sense of weightlessness, an absence of friction. The padded cell, previously a prison, is now a refuge - an anaesthetic against postmodernity. Further soft works explore ‘self-soothing’ in the context of imagery, consumption and sensation - what is at stake when we consume to be consumed, or subsume the erotic into a pornotopia whose images refer only to themselves?

Kate Williams (UK) lives and works in London. Her practice is concerned with artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of derealisation they can provoke. Drawing on her own experience of a psychoanalysis, her latest body of work Soft explores comfort - its capacity to soothe, but also to seduce or suffocate - and themes of atomisation and self-estrangement in a wholly mediated culture. Her series Soft Cell examines the allure of relinquishing agency in return for a soothing softness or sense of weightlessness - an anaesthetic against postmodern culture. Soft Core explores ‘self-soothing’ in the context of imagery, consumption and sensation - what is at stake when we consume to be consumed, or subsume the erotic into a pornotopia whose images refer only to themselves? Williams was previously a film-maker, producing visual essays in cultural analysis.

Solo exhibition: Softcore, 74 Beulah Rd E17, London (2024). Group exhibitions include: Something Quickening, Panrucker Gallery, London E17 (2024); ‘Permission to touch?’ The Dot Project, 4 Cavendish Square W1, London (2024); ‘Pourquoi London’, Gertrude X Canopy Collections, 4 Princelet St E1, London (2024); ‘Quilts: A Material Culture’, Batsford Gallery, London (2023)