Work
Williamson's work engages with themes related to memory and identity formation. Trained as a printmaker, Williamson has worked across a variety of media including archival photography, video, mixed media installations, and constructed objects.
In One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds of Sale (2018), the names given by slave masters, ages, sexes, and places of birth, along with the names of buyers and sellers, prices paid, and the date of purchase of people from the slave trade in India are written in black ink on cotton shirts. The shirts are imported from India, dipped into muddy waters drawn from the Cape Coast Castle, and hung around the grounds until Heritage Day, September 24, 2019. They are then taken down and returned to India, where they are washed clean and rehung as an installation at the Aspinwall House in Kochi. These people were transported by Dutch East India Company to work at the Cape Town Castle and the Company's Gardens. One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds of Sale Williamson incorporates the history and memory of the slave trade in order to transform the stigmatizing history into a history that can address and combat global inequalities. Upon opening the exhibition, Williamson read extracts of historical accounts while a woman picked up each shirt, read out the information on it, and then took it inside to be dipped in mud and hung on a washing line. Art brings history of slave trade to life The installation tells a story of loss and symbolizes the essence of a person that is floating in the wind, but all that remains is their memory. [4]
Williamson’s 2016 work, The Lost District, is an homage to South Africa’s District Six. Like much of her other work, [5] The Lost District addresses the effects of apartheid on South Africans. District Six was culturally and ethnically diverse until more than 60,000 of its non-white residents were forced to relocate by the South African government during apartheid. [6] This installation consists of plexiglass engravings of street-view images of what district six used to look like based on archival images. [7] Steel bars cover the engravings, representing the actions of the South African government. [8] During the exhibition, Williamson engraved a window in the gallery that overlooks the remains of District Six with a reconstruction of what District Six may have looked like in the 1960s. [9] With this engraving, Williamson aimed to “record the old buildings which still stood, mainly churches and mosques and schools, along with those hundreds of cottages and terrace houses which had been destroyed.” [10]
Williamson has produced many forms of resistance art that examines the history of South Africa. [11] and in 2009 set her artistic view to exploring globalization with her ongoing piece, Other Voices, Other Cities, which was included in Push the Limits. [12] exhibition, of February 2021, in Italy. She is the founding editor of “Artthrob.co.za”. [13]
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