Kay Lee Williams
Curator Coby Edgar reflects on her journey from Darwin to Ballina to visit artist Kay Lee Williams and observe her process in creating work for Powerhouse Castle Hill exhibition, Alchemy.
‘Kay’s work is about the tonal capacity of the medium. The love over time. The comfort of connection to place from where and who we are. It doesn’t matter, we can still respect and connect.’
My little sister never calls me several times in a row unless it's an emergency. I was about a week away from travelling to the Byron Shire to do my last interstate trip for Alchemy when my sister called to say that my great-aunt had passed away. She was the one who could see my cheeky, stubborn nature and didn’t try to control me. She was smart enough to show me another way instead of trying to force me into something I didn’t want to do. She had raised headstrong kids. ‘Yes, Coby Ann, you can feel that way but what about […insert sensible alternative here…] bub?’. The use of Coby Ann instead of Coby is reserved for family who are about to tell me off or are being extra affectionate. It’s code for, ‘Listen to what I am about to say.’
My great-aunt was my grandmother’s youngest sister. She was still very young when my grandmother passed in her 20s in the 1970s. My own mother was still a small child. My grandmother’s Cubillo sisters became our closest female family members, as well as the women on the Lee side of the family that took in my grandmother’s four children after she had passed. You can read about my Cubillo and Lee family in the news. We, like the other families I worked with on this project, can all be read about in the news. Aboriginal people are rarely afforded a life beyond the news reel. My great-aunt’s children were the ones I would hang out with most as a kid, they are a little bit older than me and all of them are headstrong, sporty and thick-skinned. My sister called and I needed to go home.
