Katherine Williams

“Irruption, from the latin irruptio, meaning to attack or assault with sudden violence. And violence takes many forms.

The recent years have been a time of sudden violence, of irruption.
Of heat, fires, rain, and flooding of unprecedented intensity. We have been locked down, and in. And as more and more news of gendered violence emerged, a deluge of truth irrupted.

Predictably, these events created space and cause to think and reflect. Through this time I looked back on the decades I believed the narratives that society created about me, and I struggled to reconcile my intellectual understanding of coercive control with the feelings of shame and guilt associated with my own experiences.

For too long, people and systems have made me feel that I deserved to be treated poorly because I am a woman. Made me accept commentary on my appearance, my behavior, my anger. Of course, the same systems and people responsible for this normative imposition are the architects of the catastrophic demise of our environment.

In this ongoing series of conceptual photography, I explore and release the intense and often contradictory emotions my reflection on these systems inspires. In my self-portraiture, I reject the need for beauty. For decades I have had a distorted worldview. Now, I intentionally distort the world to make it more real. I want the viewer to be party to the irruption, to be confronted, confused by the anger, fire, rage, injustice, fury, and power. Now it is someone else’s turn to sit with the discomfort that I have felt for as long as I can remember.

These images capture an upwelling of compassion for myself, and the discovery of power in my rage”. – Katherine Williams