Marcus Williams
Born 1962 in New Zealand, Current
EmploymentLecturer in Art and Design, Unitec.
Marcus Williams lives and works in Auckland,
New Zealand with his wife and two children. He grew up on the wild West Coast beaches near
Auckland with his two brothers; building huts in the bush, playing in streams, sliding
down sand hills and riding to school in a 1950’s bus over long, dusty dirt roads. His
very young parents raised the family in a framework of social tolerance, political
awareness and high value in the arts and they shared the experience of the liberal,
socially experimental context of 1970’s New Zealand with their children.
“Although living in a small rural
town, I realize in retrospect that in the 1970’s I enjoyed what might have been the
very peak of highly progressive, in some cases radical educational policy and practice in
20th century New Zealand”.
After traveling widely in Europe and Asia
and working with a team of sheep dogs in the New Zealand back country, Marcus studied art
at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland in his late twenties and then at RMIT
University in Melbourne Australia in his early thirties.
His art is fundamentally concerned with
the problem of human communication.
“Next to physical contact, language,
in its most expanded semiotic sense and including all media, is the primary means by which
human beings avoid isolation. The failure or limitations of language and all forms of
communication determine to a large degree any sense of isolation people might have. We
must to a certain degree live inside our own head, within the abstract space of our
interpretation of the perceptual information which comes our way”.
Marcus works with photography, video,
installation and collaborative projects involving the wider public. His most enduring
interest lies in the creation of ‘total installations’ which implicate the
viewer within a multi sensory environment. Marcus has participated in residencies and
festivals in Italy, Estonia and New Zealand and has exhibited also in Britain, Russia, USA
and Australia.
• Smoke in
• response
and responselessness |