Caro Williams is a London-based installation and mixed media artist who works with symbols, sound, language, and place. Much of her work is inspired by literature, poetry, and the natural world.
“Caro Williams’ work is actually quite hard to describe in a nutshell but that doesn’t detract from its accessibility and magic. Indeed its refusal to be pinned down goes to its very heart.
Caro recently wrote that she is ‘searching for the moment in which intelligibility fades into ambiguity and mystery.’ She often translates or ‘processes’ things – sounds, words, film clips, lines from poems, ideas – into another materiality through erasure, covering, digital manipulation or reconstitution via another substance. There is a poetic oddness to these processes. Sounds are silenced as they get transformed into materials (for example, sound waveforms in glinting metal, or silence is made manifest through the lushness of velvet) and these in turn become apprehended by another sense – sight – as well as a visceral appreciation of the material used.
The process of translation leaves a kind of poem in the viewer’s mind. We are suspended in a dreamlike space where meaning is ambiguous: we see and hear something that is familiar yet at the same time it is out of reach. Perhaps this is why, despite the beauty and pleasure of the work, there is something melancholic about it too.”
Caro exhibits nationally and internationally, receiving recognition for her work, including awards and funding such as the Creative New Zealand WW1 Centenary Co-commissioning Fund (2016). She co-curated exhibitions like "Contemporary Art + Ritual" at the Crypt Gallery, London (2019), and her installations have been featured in Wells Art Contemporary, Wells Cathedral (2022), and the Royal Society of Sculptors Summer Exhibitions, London (2020, 2022 and 2024). Caro was awarded the Royal Albert Memorial Museum – Museum at Large Public Art Commission, Exeter (2021), for her large-scale mixed media light and sound installation, "Lark Song," and her work "In the White Dawn" was shortlisted for the 2023 Aesthetica Art Prize.
Caro is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS) and ArtCan.