Stephen Willats

"Every cultural landscape requires its signposts, not just to get around in the present, to find out where and what things are, but to point to a vision of the future, to show a possible destiny. I see this as a consequence and a function of my practice as an artist to intervene in the status quo of the cultural infrastructure to implant signposts that will enable a perceptual transformation of existing reality."
Stephen Willats

Since the early 1960s, Stephen Willats has initiated many seminal multi-media art projects everywhere from tennis clubs and public galleries to inner city housing estates. Combining cybernetic and philosophical models, information theory, systems analysis, semiotics with an ideology of community, Willats has developed work which reacts against what he sees as the historical determinism of art. Rather than presenting visitors with icons of certainty he creates a random, complex environment which stimulates visitors to engage in their own creative process rather than just submitting to passive observation.

Through Your Symbolic World extends the territory in which art operates, encompassing the socio-urban environment, personal narratives and the everyday as sites in which art can be based. Each of the five new works represents an encoded world that has been made in a relationship between the artist and a group of participants who were invited to make a multichannel documentation including audio recording, film, personal writings still photography etc - recording from as many as twelve different viewpoints – of a journey by an individual or individuals in familiar urban settings, through a motorway underpass, across a bridge and down a high street. What results is a Symbolic World that is presented as a vehicle through which viewers can relook and transform the way in which they perceive the fabric of the world and create a possible route through to a personal vision of the future.