Each of the twelve monochrome photographs that comprise Illusion of Agency shows tiny model-makers’ staffage figures. All appear, in serial-mode, against a sheet of paper. As the minimalistic background is unchanging, the unavoidable corollary is that this is a limitless universe. It comes also to be timeless. A soft grey tonality – a semi-crepuscular light-level – prevails.

The figures have manifested in the form of a ‘sprue’ – the interconnected injectionmoulded plastic parts that typically are disconnected from an armature, to supply the components of a construction-kit. In this case, the figures come attached like leaves to a twig, or like churns filling in a milking parlour. Some have fallen or come adrift. The umbilicus itself now attaches to the heads instead of the bodies of those that remain – gravityless in space. A symbolism can be construed: mind is as ignorant as is body of the source of its vital force.

On a closer perspective, however, speculative interpretation shifts to the empathetic, for the figures are modelled minutely and variously by gender, age, action, demeanour. The viewer imputes, by natural and eager impulse, something of life, individual or social. So, there is the high perspective and the low. There is that of reason and logical speculation; and there is that attempting the intimate engagement of cordial imagination, (constructing a possible escape from our, finally, solitary condition). There is abstraction or empathy.

And there is the challenge to resolve this dualistic opposition of perspectives. But that is the task of the philosopher.

There remains the third tactic. It is that of art and poetry, and of the artist. They do not attempt resolution of opposition – an end-point at which their work is done. Instead, they call a halt to fretful questing and rest upon the beauty of the complex moment. They are without agency, as are Williams's proxies, here pictured in suspended time – tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…