Brett Williams

My practice explores the relationship between emotional states and constructed environments, using landscape as a site where memory, loss, and introspection converge. My work examines emotional endurance through themes of grief, heartache, envy, and the tenderness that follows loss. The abandoned pools and emptied landscapes serve as metaphors for psychological states, suggesting spaces once animated but now suspended in liminality. They embody the tension between containment and erosion, between what remains and what has been withdrawn. Here, the act of painting functions as a process of excavation. Layers are applied and reworked, allowing traces of earlier gestures to remain visible. These accumulated marks form a kind of emotional sediment, recording shifts in thought and feeling over time. Imperfection becomes part of the structure, much like memory, which never settles into one fixed image. Each composition is an attempt to reconcile beauty with desolation. The drained pools and architectural voids reflect both absence and persistence, holding an uneasy balance between the constructed and the organic. My use of brushwork and tonal shifts aims to heighten this uncertainty, allowing edges to blur and forms to waver. The resulting instability mirrors the diAiculty of holding emotion without trying to contain or define it. Through this practice I seek a form of restoration where there is no resolution. To paint these emptied spaces is to acknowledge what cannot be repaired and to find, within that acknowledgment, a sense of return to self.