Aaron Williamson
As an artist and writer Aaron Williamson’s work with performance, objects, place and text is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised, yet humorous sensibility towards disability.
Over the last twenty-five years Williamson has created over 300 performances, videos, installations and publications in Britain, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Scandinavia, USA, South America, Canada and many other countries around the world. In that time he has received over 20 artist’s awards including: the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome; British Council China Artist Links Residency; A Three-Year AHRC Fellowship, BIAD, Birmingham University; Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary, Shape/Spike Island; Acme Studios Stephen Cripps Award; Unlimited 2 Commission; in addition to a number of projects supported by Arts Council England, the British Council, Henry Moore Foundation, and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Williamson received a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex in 1997, and has published widely, firstly in poetry (‘A Holythroat Symposium’ (1993), and in the influential anthology ‘Conductors of Chaos’ (ed. Iain Sinclair, 1996). In 2008 he produced an artist’s monograph for the Live Art Development Agency: ‘Aaron Williamson: Performance / Video / Collaboration’ (2008). A DVD of video works ‘Quick Clips and Short Cuts’ was also published by LADA in 2011.
Often, Williamson devises unique works that are created on-site immediately prior to their public presentation. Informed by research, these consider the situation he encounters and represent, in part, a response to them. He has made works in shopping centres, streets, public museums, galleries, as well as in unusual places such as mountains, rivers, volcanic craters, small islands, a lock up garage, and rooftops. Williamson has collaborated with many other artists, including with Katherine Araniello as the Disabled Avant-Garde; and with the international performance collective The Wolf in the Winter.
At a University of California San Diego lecture in 1998, Williamson coined the term 'Deaf Gain' as a counter-emphasis to 'hearing loss' - an idea that has gained worldwide momentum since.
A career-length retrospective of Aaron Williamson’s work as an artist, along with a new large-scale commissioned installation work will be exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester, UK, in May 2019.
