Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson (born 1941) is an artist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1948 she immigrated with her family to South Africa. Between 1963 and 1965 she studied at the Art Students League of New York. In 1983 she earned her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town. In 2007 she received the Visual Arts Research Award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and in 2011 the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. In 201

9 quotes found

"I am trying to reconstruct a vision of District Six as it was in the 1960s,"

"As far as was possible, I worked from old archival photos of the district, first engraving, then inking up the areas with etching ink, and finally cleaning the ink from the surface, so that only the ink in the lines remained. I used a tin of ink I discovered in my studio, dating from the 80s and made by the incomparable T E Lawrence of London."

"Standing at the window through many different weathers, trying to reconstruct that vanished landscape, many visitors to the gallery came up to me to chat, and recall their memories of District Six, or asked me what exactly I was doing."

"I enjoyed these encounters. As an artist, one so seldom knows what the reaction of visitors to a gallery really is, or if they understand what one is trying to do."

"Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in video, photography and installation. Her work addresses the media, social issues and aspects of contemporary history."

"Williamson also writes and lectures about art, and is the author of the classic ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989). In 2009, she published ‘South African Art Now’ (HarperCollins, New York)."

"Throughout her career artist Sue Williamson has asked viewers of her photos, videos, urban graffiti and other pigeonhole-resistant labours to critically think about how and where they live."

"Williamson is a social commentator and combines slick aesthetic devices with hard, cutting edge facts of life. This is almost contradictory, yet it is precisely in this tension, that we are both lured into the artwork and then come away thinking about the issues, the image thus returns to text as it were."

"Williamson ran a series of workshops where she explored the power of place and its identity to various citizens. At the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached on how best to exemplify their feelings around that particular place."