The alchemist’s shack

Professor of Fine Art, Robert Williams, is participating in a high-profile exhibition launched in February 2023 at The Aldritch Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, USA. Professor Williams will re-locate and re-imagine his long-standing Alchemist’s Shack project from Pennsylvania, into a purpose-built facsimile at The Aldritch. The project focuses on the creation of an alchemical laboratory housed in a vernacular building. Williams says of the project: ‘The Alchemist’s Shack is made up of material that reveals the lost homeland of the ex-pat, creating a nostalgic, if inaccurate view of a past England, and impossible futures for a long-lived alchemist passing through different cultural moments, building a reality that is contingent upon the library and collection of objects contained in the shack. In referencing the first American alchemist, Eirineus Philalethes, it also offers an idealised and largely fictional American alchemical role model, existing nostalgically in a sort of eternal mythic time. The enterprise is very much like alchemy itself - a search for enlightenment, an enquiry that takes on many forms, and rather like alchemy, does so poetically, whilst eclectically plundering other forms of knowledge.’ The exhibition, Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art, brings together a high-profile list of American, British and international artists. Richard Klein, the exhibition curator writes, ‘(it is) a group exhibition that links individual works of art with an element of the periodic table which each work incorporates. Superficially, the exhibition’s foundation is science, but through expansive curatorial choices the project will reveal the material basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Artists use specific materials for a reason, quite often for their metaphoric potential, and Prima Materia will explore hard facts as well as alchemical conjecture.