Matthew Arthur Williams

This exhibition spanning both galleries at DCA centred around a newly commissioned film and sound installation alongside photographic work, developed using conversations, interviews and materials from both public and private histories, records and archives. In this work, Williams draws together a number of disparate places – particularly Stoke-on-Trent in England and Clarendon in Jamaica – which intimately connect to a far-reaching and complex conception of home for the artist.  

Many of the production techniques used within this project are deliberately analogue in nature, including black and white photography and 16mm film. These delicate processes bear the marks of the artist’s hand and body more readily than their digital counterparts, which we are all used to consuming at an accelerated rate through screens and monitors in our daily lives. In his work Williams refuses modes of rapid consumption in favour of slow and careful approaches to considered and responsible image making. 

The title Soon Come is also a gentle invitation to slow down our thinking in fast-paced environments. In the West Indies, particularly in Jamaica, ‘soon come’ is an elusive sentiment that bypasses a specific idea of time or progress and instead embraces the unknown and ungraspable. For Williams, the meaning behind this phrase hints at both the immediate and the eternal: “It’s multiplicitous. It’s between now and never.” 

A new book published as part of this project contains newly commissioned texts by writer and curator Nydia Swaby and scholar and poet Gabriella Gay. 

 Listen to an audio version of the Exhibition Notes for Matthew Arthur Williams: Soon Come here.