Stephen Willats

Stephen Willats was born in 1943 in London, where he continues to live and work.

Since the early 1960s, Stephen Willats has situated his practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as cybernetics, advertising systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology. In so doing, he has constructed and developed a collaborative, interactive and participatory practice grounded in the variables of social relationships, settings and physical realities.

Willats creates multi-sensory, multi-dimensional environments to encourage viewers to engage with their own creative and cognitive processes. Using the fabric of society – the everyday – as a site of investigation, his work presents a vehicle of exchange through which viewers can re-examine and transform the way they perceive the fabric of existing reality.

For six decades, Willats has concentrated on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship, and self-organisation, and has initiated many seminal multi-media art projects everywhere from tennis clubs and public galleries to inner city housing estates. Outside of the norms and conventions of an object-based art world, Willats has developed work which reacts against what he sees as the historical determinism within art. Rather than presenting visitors with icons of certainty he creates a random, complex environment which stimulates visitors to engage in their own creative process rather than merely submitting to passive observation.

Importantly, Willats represents particular individual relations in a generalised form, affirming that it is useful to consider social situations on both a universal and a personal level. Observations of the macro- and micro-scale, of the generic and the specific, and of engagement and distance in Willats’ work serve to problematise and present various points of entry into contemporary social relationships, thereby providing a vision of how they could be community centred.