Bloc Billboard: Siân Williams
20 July – 20 October
Free & Open to All
We are delighted to present I dreamt I saw an azure sky by Sheffield-based artist Siân Williams, a Bloc Billboard Commission selected out of our Bloc Members’ open call. Drop by to have a look and listen next time you are near Eyre Lane.
Bloc Billboard Commissions now include an audio element that you can access on our website or with a QR code next to the physical work. We are especially grateful to former Bloc Billboard artist June Lam for provoking us to reconsider the non-sighted possibilities of the billboard.
Siân’s sculptural practice has turned to film, sound and writing during the pandemic as her perspective was constrained by the lockdown and life at home. Tracking her solitary responses to the social and political shifts that lay beyond her reach, she made a series of filmic narratives on her phone that concentrated on her hands and their gestures. Blown up to befit a public setting, the audio-visual work speaks of a tentative step into the world as we collectively re-emerge from a long period of confinement.
I dreamt I saw an azure sky; blue and vast and stretching up higher than I could reach. I heard the sound of water, waves lapping at an unseen shore, and I dreamt I saw the sea reflected in the sky.
I dreamt I saw my hands, searching their way into the bright blue abyss, palms turned towards me and fingers slowly curving. It seemed as if my hands closed around nothing, but in that nothing there was everything; scattered droplets of sunlight, vibrating waves of sound. Salt and sand and sweat.
My hands hung there, suspended, caught between sea and sky, in a perpetual state of transition. I ask myself, what comes next? Do I exhale, do I release, or do I reach up further and try to catch the dancing waves of light?
I dreamt I saw an azure sky; blue and vast and stretching up higher than I could reach. I heard the sound of water, waves lapping at an unseen shore, and I dreamt I saw the sea reflected in the sky.
Siân Williams (b. 1980, UK) works primarily with sculpture, performance, film, and text. Using found or domestic materials and referencing craft techniques such as weaving and crochet, Siân considers ideas around intimacy, proximity, and collective acts, siting her practice at the point between materiality and imagination and the narratives that emerge from there.
Siân completed a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts in 2002. In 2015 she graduated with an MA with Distinction from Sheffield Institute of Arts and was awarded the Dianne Willcocks Lifelong Learning Prize. Siân is based in Sheffield and is one of the first cohort of artists on Platform 19, a two year residency at Site Gallery funded through the Freelands Artist Programme.