Laura Cleary Williams (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the emotional and embodied language of mark-making through drawing, embroidery, and textile installation. Working primarily in graphite, silk tulle, and thread, Williams constructs ephemeral spatial compositions that hover between presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Her practice is rooted in the belief that gesture is a form of knowledge, visceral, fragmented, and deeply human. Williams holds an MFA in Printmaking from SCAD-Atlanta (2012), where she attended on full scholarship, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2009). She also studied at the New York Crit Club in 2024 as part of the Canopy program. Early in her career, Williams was part of the team at SCAD's Southeastern Center for Printmaking, where she collaborated on major print projects with Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond.

Early in her career, Williams was part of the team at SCAD's Southeastern Center for Printmaking, where she collaborated on major print projects with Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond. She went on to co-found and direct Straw Hat Press, a fine art publishing studio specializinEarly in her career, Williams was part of the team at SCAD's Southeastern Center for Printmaking, where she collaborated on major print projects with Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond. es including Kai Lin Gallery (Atlanta), Warnes Contemporary (Brooklyn), Equity Gallery (New York), and Teufelhof Basel (Switzerland). Her work has been featured in New Visionary, Studio Visit Magazine, Suboart, and Beyond Words Literary Magazine. She was a 2025 artist-inresidence at Stove Works. She is a 2026 VCCA artist-in-residence and a 2027 Ramona Residency artist-in-resident. Williams lives and works in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“The current work began as a single ink sketchbook: page after page made quickly and in sequence, each one testing what a rectangle can hold and where a mark is allowed to run past its edge. I have since taken that sketchbook apart, cutting the pages free and having each one framed individually as its own finished piece. What was once one continuous, private sequence is now a set of small, separate works: captured pages, each holding a single moment of pressure against the confines of its frame. Drawing has always been my first language. I come from a family of lawyers, where language existed to persuade, to resolve, to close a case. I have always been drawn instead to the register underneath that, the one that refuses to resolve: the flicker of being swept up in someone, the spark that arrives before you can name it, the strange privilege of living in another person's head and carrying them in yours. Working inside the sketchbook let me push against that same resistance to resolution, page by page, in real time. Taking it apart afterward, framing each page on its own, does the same work again: it turns one continuous, private record into single moments you can return to and sit with, one at a time. This work holds open a space that usually closes too fast: the space between an encounter and its ending, between being marked by someone and moving on. It is not an argument, and it does not ask to be solved. It is an attempt to give shape, however briefly, to what a person's spark, weight, or return does to you, and to what stays stitched into your own drawing long after they are gone. That is the kind of truth I am after: not the kind that convinces a room, but the kind that surfaces quietly, in ink, graphite, and glimmer, and asks only to be felt.” -Laura Cleary Williams