POOL is concerned with artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of estrangement they can provoke. In the absurdity of representing architectural space in fabric, and in their discordant perspectives and scale, the works draw on the playful, dreamlike qualities of postmodern architectural conceits, and of 17/18th century trompe l’oeil, and classical frescoes before them, to invoke a mildly unsettling, delicious participation in the Irreal.

Kate Williams (UK) lives and works in London. Her practice is concerned with artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of derealisation they can provoke. Drawing on her own experience of a psychoanalysis, her latest body of work Soft explores comfort - its capacity to soothe, but also to seduce or suffocate - and themes of atomisation and self-estrangement in a wholly mediated culture. Her series Soft Cell examines the allure of relinquishing agency in return for a soothing softness or sense of weightlessness - an anaesthetic against postmodern culture. Soft Core explores ‘self-soothing’ in the context of imagery, consumption and sensation - what is at stake when we consume to be consumed, or subsume the erotic into a pornotopia whose images refer only to themselves? Williams was previously a film-maker, producing visual essays in cultural analysis.

Solo exhibition: felt, expressed, chosen, SLQS Gallery, London (2025); Softcore, 74 Beulah Rd E17, London (2024). Group exhibitions include: Something Quickening, Panrucker Gallery, London E17 (2024); ‘Permission to touch?’ The Dot Project, 4 Cavendish Square W1, London (2024); ‘Pourquoi London’, Gertrude X Canopy Collections, 4 Princelet St E1, London (2024); ‘Quilts: A Material Culture’, Batsford Gallery, London (2023)