SLQS Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Kate Williams: Our Own Device. Bringing together two bodies of work, Pool and Soft, the exhibition centres on The Cruel Optimists, a site specific installation exploring the pleasures of artifice and the seductive power of consciously constructed worlds. Through exaggerated perspective, padded trompe-l'œil, taut ribbons and swollen forms that distend the structure's dimpled surface, the installation stages a continual negotiation between illusion and physical reality, comfort and unease, play and dependence. Rather than treating artifice as deception, Williams proposes it as a condition of shared imaginative life. At a moment when the environments through which we encounter images and each other are increasingly shaped by algorithmic systems and AI, the work asks what happens when the frame separating consciously bounded acts of artifice from everyday experience begins to dissolve.
Artist Biography
Kate Williams is a London-based artist working across sculpture, textiles and installation. Using quilting to construct both images and environments, her work explores illusion, comfort and self-estrangement through two interconnected bodies of work, Pool and Soft. Drawing on traditions of trompe-l'œil, theatrical illusion and decorative architecture, her practice examines the pleasures and implications of artifice and constructed worlds. Her work is informed by her experience of Kleinian psychoanalysis and by an enduring interest in visual culture, particularly the relationship between seduction, spectatorship and self-estrangement.
Self-taught, Williams previously worked as a filmmaker, producing visual essays on pornography, surveillance, consumption and representation before establishing her current practice.
Selected exhibitions: Make Do / Make Space, Hypha South Bank, (2026); Table Manners, Barbati Gallery, Venice (2025); felt, expressed, chosen, SLQS Gallery, London (2025); Mega Art Fair with SLQS Gallery, Milan (2025); Something Quickening, Panrucker, London (2024); Permission to Touch, Dot Projects, London (2024); Pourquoi London?, Gertrude x Canopy Collections, London (2024). Selected Residencies: Artist Roundtable, led by Pia Biasi, Director of Victoria Miro Venice (2025).