Bedwyr Williams
My Bad
Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 2012
112 pp., 24 x 17 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown
Published to accompany the exhibition Bedwyr Williams: My Bad at Ikon Gallery, this catalogue features contributions from Mark Beasley, Karen MacKinnon and Williams. Comprised largely of newly commissioned installation and sculptural pieces, the traveling exhibition also featured drawings, paintings and photography.
"[My Bad] feels like a tour round Williams's mind – his bugbears, his fantasies, his comic fears and preoccupations. It does not, alas, include films of his performances and so the circle is not quite complete. But there is a round room devoted entirely to his pencil drawings, those closest of all intimations of an artist's day-to-day thoughts. These drawings are surprising to say the least, not unlike John Tenniel in their quirky lexicon of creatures: a pair of half-human turtles conversing glumly by a lake, a lock of hair turning into a woe-begone female figure.
A grand staircase that seems to have a case of the shakes, as if hungover after the all-night ball, a man whose conversation is blocked by his own mutinous lips: these images freeze the gag before the punchline. Bizarre jeux d'esprit, they seem to issue from some other part of Williams's mind, until one considers that the work in this show all belongs to a world outside speech."
- Laura Cumming, The Guardian
Available from Cornerhouse Publications, here, for £17.00.
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