WATER / COLOUR draws on Williams’ practice of making watercolour paintings of natural and cultural encounters on Redonda and Cortes islands, where she has lived since the 1970s. She is a keen observer of the way that human events shape places, habits and objects, and vice versa, which informs her approach to making paintings as well as books, assemblages and installations of experiential research and collected materials. In the 1990s, her long-term investment in the mid-coast islands sharpened her focus on the historical and living imprint of Indigenous communities on the territory, as well as the influence and impact of early European explorers and settlers.

Williams exploration of Bute Inlet led to her exhibition High Slack at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (1993/4) and the publication of High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996). Through this project, she developed a methodology of “poetic archeology”, which informed her artistic practice and the research and writing of four more books about the region: Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893–1998 (2001), Dynamite Stories (2003), Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast (2006), and Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs (2019).

Cougar Companions emerged following Williams’ introduction to Bute Wax, a beguiling substance that intermittently and inexplicably emerges in Bute’s waters. She was gifted a jar of the wax that was collected in the 1920s by the Schnarr family, who were early settlers in the inlet, and it is featured in WATER / COLOUR. As Williams collected water, she encountered oral and material data about cultural, geological and marine phenomena like the wax. This led her to explore stories from the Homalco Nation, historical settlers and current residents; as well as to research power projects from the 1920s to the present. In previous iterations of the exhibition, the investigative material she collected was presented in booklets and a display cabinet.

In 2021, Williams resumed gathering water after a significant landslide lurched down Elliot Creek into the Southgate River. The Homathko Icefield at the north end of the inlet––the third largest outside of the Arctic––was melting, and its recession exposed a large rock that separated from the mountain and fell into Elliot Lake, displacing a massive amount of fresh water, which in turn propelled the slide. The event was evidence that the inlet is threatened not only by industrial exploitation, but also by the rapid warming of the atmosphere.