Exhibitions
LAURA CLEARY WILLIAMS: BEYOND THE VEIL
Wavelength Space / 854 McCallie Ave. October 3 - November 7th
Laura Cleary Williams
You are invited to Beyond the Veil: Memories of Space & Time by Laura Cleary Williams featuring drawing, video, and fiber installations. The show will be on view through November 7th with an artist talk at the closing reception. The gallery is open by-appointment throughout the duration of the exhibition. Visit our website or click the button below to schedule your visit!
Laura Cleary Williams (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the emotional and embodied language of mark-making through drawing, embroidery, and textile installation. Working primarily in graphite, silk tulle, and thread, Williams constructs ephemeral spatial compositions that hover between presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Her practice is rooted in the belief that gesture is a form of knowledge—visceral, fragmented, and deeply human.
Williams holds an MFA in Printmaking from SCAD-Atlanta (2012), where she attended on full scholarship, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2009). She also studied at the New York Crit Club in 2024 as part of the Canopy program. Early in her career, Williams was part of the team at SCAD's Southeastern Center for Printmaking, where she collaborated on major print projects with Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond. She went on to co-found and direct Straw Hat Press, a fine art publishing studio specializing in collaborative printmaking.
Her recent solo exhibitions include: The Auras I See at Good Art Co (Greenville, 2023) and Unveiled at Carrie Able Gallery (Brooklyn, 2024). Williams has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Kai Lin Gallery (Atlanta), Warnes Contemporary (Brooklyn), Equity Gallery (New York), and Teufelhof Basel (Switzerland). Her work has been featured in New Visionary, Studio Visit Magazine, Suboart, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. She is a 2025 artist-in-residence at Stove Works.
My work traces the fragile edges of memory, time, and space. It centers on what lingers, what fades, and what insists on returning. I think of it as drawing not just on paper, but into air itself. Whether working with delicate pencil marks or suspended silk tulle and thread, I am drawn to the threshold where presence meets absence. These are not illustrations of memory; they are memory embodied, folded, stitched, and layered in translucent form. The work reflects the sensation of being haunted by time in motion, of moving through grief, wonder, and stillness all at once.
Drawing has always been my first language, but over time it has outgrown its surface. I now work across materials, letting thread and fabric function as line and plane. I draw into space rather than across it. My embroidered tulle installations act like ghost drawings: light-sensitive, barely there, and always shifting. The tulle holds nothing and everything, with marks that drift, stitches that bind, and glimmers that refuse to settle. These works focus not only on what is visible, but on what is lost in the folds. In parallel, my pencil drawings offer a quieter intimacy. Dense clusters of marks float or radiate across the page like constellations or weather patterns, mapping sensation as much as structure.
This work matters to me because it feels like truth. Not the kind found in a headline or a courtroom, but the kind that flickers behind your ribs when something long forgotten rises to the surface. I come from a family of lawyers, where language was built for persuasion and clarity. But I have always been drawn to the language that slips between the cracks, to what cannot quite be said but needs to be felt. These pieces are offerings to that space. They are slow, strange, and searching. They are the ghosts I carry forward and the ones I have learned to release.
-LAURA CLEARY WILLIAMS
