In Beyond the Veil, Chattanooga-based artist Laura Cleary Williams invites viewers into an atmosphere of quiet intensity, an immersive field where drawing, textile, and light converge. The exhibition includes large-scale graphite drawings, embroidered silk tulle installations, and video works that together form a meditation on memory, time, and the body as a site of knowing.

Williams’ practice begins with gesture. “I think of it as drawing not just on paper, but into air itself.” Her marks, whether made with pencil, thread, or light, exist in a liminal space between presence and absence. This is work that does not depict memory so much as embody it. “These are not illustrations of memory; they are memory folded, stitched, and layered in translucent form.”

In the central installation, suspended planes of silk tulle drift like phantom drawings, “light-sensitive, barely there, and always shifting.” Thread functions as both line and scar, binding the immaterial to the physical. Graphite drawings nearby echo this gesture in quieter, denser form. Clusters of marks become constellations or weather systems, mapping sensation as much as structure.

Williams writes, “This work matters to me because it feels like truth, not the kind found in a headline or a courtroom, but the kind that flickers behind your ribs when something long forgotten rises to the surface.” Trained in printmaking and deeply attuned to material process, she has evolved her practice into something both intimate and architectural. These are drawings that breathe, textiles that remember, and spaces that hold silence.

The exhibition asks us to linger in what cannot quite be named. “I have always been drawn to the language that slips between the cracks,” Williams says. “These pieces are offerings to that space. They are slow, strange, and searching. They are the ghosts I carry forward and the ones I have learned to release.”