Rudi Williams
(b. 1993, Milan, Italy. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Rudi Williams is a photomedia artist and teacher working with historic and contemporary image-making processes. Elliptical and layered, her photographs often depict distortions, reflections, visual anomalies and traces of human life on otherwise inanimate surfaces. To Williams, photography is a sculptural form that deserves to lifted from gallery walls and displayed in spaces and installations that viewers can encounter from every angle.

Williams’s contribution to Slippery Images is a selection of four photographs from her recent solo exhibition at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, entitled unfixed: σκιά σκιά σκιά ombra ombra ombra shadow shadow shadow (2021). Williams presents a series of photographic sequences that change over the course of the exhibition, with the gradual unearthing of each artwork evoking the passing of time. Meticulously hand-printed, these images draw from the artist’s archive of photographs taken on visits to Italy, Switzerland, France and other locations. In the fluctuating form, the exhibition becomes a fluid remnant of experience, reminding us of photography’s influence on what is remembered (and forgotten) and the role of the image in our emotional attachments.

Born in Italy, Williams has been based in Melbourne for most of her life. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015. In Melbourne, she has exhibited solo at Sutton Gallery, Fort Delta, Caves Gallery and c3 Contemporary Art Space, and in group shows at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, The Substation and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria. In late 2021, her large-scale installation Vantage Point, which documented the Metro Tunnel excavation sites over the course of two years, could been seen on the corner of Swanston and Franklin Streets in Melbourne.