Matthew Arthur Williams - Soon Come

This exhibition debuts a new body of work by Glasgow-based artist Matthew Arthur Williams, marking his first major solo exhibition in a UK institution. Throughout his career Williams' work has developed through close collaboration with others, creating projects that explore visibility, care, love, family, memory, representation and resistance. His work expands on traditional understandings of portraiture by concentrating on defying erasure, building an archive of subjects and shifting narratives considering what it means to be Black, to be queer, and to inhabit rural environments. The title Soon Come is a gentle invitation to slow down our thinking in fast-paced environments. In the West Indies, particularly in Jamaica, 'soon come' is an elusive sentiment that bypasses a specific idea of time or progress and instead embraces the unknown and ungraspable. For Williams, the meaning behind this phrase hints at both the immediate and the eternal: "It's multiplicitous. It's between now and never." This new book published as part of this project contains newly commissioned texts by writer and curator Nydia Swaby and scholar and poet Gabriella Gay.