Evelyn Williams

Evelyn Williams is known for her introspective large-scale drawings and reliefs. Born in London to Welsh parents, Williams spent substantial parts of her life living in Wales, including as part of her time at the unconventional Summerhill boarding-school (1932–44). Following her art education at St Martin’s School of Art (1944–7) and the Royal College of Art (1947–50), Williams first attracted acclaim for her portraits of children. She moved towards greater three-dimensionality in the 1960s and large reliefs from the mid-1970s. Controversy surrounded her success in the John Moores Exhibition (1961) because she had entered the paper maché relief as a painting, but won the sculpture prize. Common subjects include crowds, sleeping figures, and whirlpools. Distance – whether between self-image and reality, the individual and the crowd – often informs her work, which can perhaps relate to her lamentations about Summerhill being a time of ‘sadness, a sense of loss, of being outside.’ A selection of her writing and work was posthumously compiled into the book Evelyn Williams Works and Words (Omnific: London, 1998) by Derek Birdsall and Bruce Bernard (eds).