The found object has an enduring fascination for many artists, but few have such an affectionate, observant obsession as Joby Williamson. Used plastic buckets, broom handles, crushed cardboard boxes, fragile and abandoned tables, screwed up and thrown away post-it notes: these prosaic things, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, are the source for Williamson’s artworks and installations. His practice pivots around “the inverted memory we apply to objects” and acts as an archaeological appreciation of today’s artefacts.
Williamson takes this exploration in two directions. Firstly, artworks that stem from discarded objects but that find a new form, often pushing technical boundaries in the process. Then there are the works in which the collection itself is the artwork. Joby Williamson has been collecting discarded Post-It Notes for ten years. What began as idle curiosity, picking up a screwed-up scrap of paper from the pavement, has become a commitment to capturing these ephemeral narratives of everyday life. His show What Have You Forgotten? (with an accompanying publication) at Tintype in 2010, presented a selection of Post-It Notes projected large-scale onto the gallery walls – an anthology of personal and working lives, from the prosaic to the profound.
Williamson recently created a series of works for the Southbank Centre's summer-long celebrations to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Festival of Britain; he also had a open-air public installation running for six months in Reykjavik, Iceland. He is currently working on a commission for Vital Arts for the new Royal London Hospital.
Joby Williamson curated the Irregular Wasps show at Tintype in 2010 with fellow artist Peter Lamb. His work has been shown in London, New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo, Reykjavík and Stuttgart.
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