Kelly Williams

"These Irish Goddesses are torn from the land. I begin by building layers of encaustic, an ancient beeswax-based painting medium, fusing each layer with a torch. I create homemade inks using elemental materials: peat ash sourced from endangered Irish bogs, carbon and charcoals, all vestiges of fire, mixed with water drawn from St. Brigid's holy well. I work the surface, marking and scarring it until the piece transforms into an abstract topography. I embed gold as a symbol of the complex, competing values, ecological, ancestral, and cultural, inherent in this land. The figure lives inside the layers and I tear her free, burning and charring the edges, dipping them in wax. This gives them a sense of becoming, responding to temperature, the paper shifting as the wax warms or stiffens.
Peat has warmed and fed Irish people for millennia, the hearth fire at the center of story and myth. Burned to ash and brought back into the wax, it becomes flesh. The goddess is not separate from the land. She is made of it, found within it, torn free from the same scarred surface. These figures stand marked and imperfect. The work holds the damage and the endurance together."