Yodea Marquel Williams

Yodea Marquel Williams is a London-based artist and designer whose work explores how bodies, garments, and objects hold memory. Through archive, ritual, and oscillation, Williams treats material culture as a site where histories of survival, exclusion, and transformation remain present.

Drawing on ancestral practices, cultural memory, and subjective experience, Williams creates garments, sculptures, and installations that preserve traces of wear, repair, and endurance. The work holds tensions between purity and impurity, preservation and decay, beauty and destruction, without resolution.

At the intersection of fashion, contemporary art, and material research, Williams explores ritual as resistance and objects as living archives. Through repair, reuse, and material transformation, the practice asks what survives, what is erased, and how memory inhabits matter. Rather than treating imperfection as failure, Williams approaches scars, traces, and residues as evidence of endurance, creating works that preserve histories threatened by erasure.

Yodea Marquel Williams is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2026/27.