After her father's death, Diane Briones Williams says grief reshaped her practice

Diane Briones Williams's father died last year, and the Los Angeles textile artist said the loss changed her work, making it more personal and direct than before.

Williams, represented by Ariel Pittman of Los Angeles gallery Official Welcome, works in weaving, embroidery, and fiber collage. She described her practice and its shaping conditions in written responses to standardized questions from Urgent Matter.

"There's no clean separation between a loss of that magnitude and the work," Williams said.

Her work has long dealt with what gets passed down between generations, she said, but her father's death “brought all of that out of the conceptual and into the visceral.”

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“The work that's emerging on the other side of that grief is different, more personal, more urgent, more willing to be vulnerable in ways I hadn't previously allowed," Williams said. "He shaped more of the practice than I may have fully realized while he was alive. That understanding is still settling.”