Meet Melissa Williams | Artist & Mystic

We had the good fortune of connecting with Melissa Williams and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Melissa, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Without question, intuition. And let me preface the rest of my response with this: I’m an artist to my core. I enjoy thinking of life as if it’s an art project and I’ve experimented with this concept as a lifestyle for a few years. Thinking of reality this way keeps me curious and in love with my life – and in my mind, intuition is the driving force behind the artistic process. In 2019, I started to experiment with the premise that life could be an art project and conducted my first experiments based on intuition. I wanted to know how to access my intuition as a tool to create what I want – both artistically and personally. I started by focusing on something I wanted and skeptically made short contracts with myself, proposing things like “for the next hour, I’ll follow any intuitive nudges I get and if I like the results, I’ll run a follow-up experiment”. Without disappointment or exception, listening to my intuition created outcomes that felt surreal, and juicy, and electrifying (and I had the added benefit of feeling like a cheeky little wizard). After months of collecting evidence, I embraced that my intuition could lead me to the career opportunities I wanted. These more involved experiments resulted in tangible results like: transformative artist assistant positions, connecting with my first clients in a spiritual Discord community, Co-Producing a Psychic Faire, amazing jobs in art museums, starting my business, podcast interviews, and all of my art shows post college. This back and forth conversation with my intuition started the series of photographs that accompany this article – and these images are some of the first that truly feel like an extension of myself. Five years later, I still make all of my creative, business, and personal decisions intuitively. 

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?

I’m a fine art photographer currently interested in the role intuition plays in art making, how intuition is influenced by the energy of physical locations, and intuition’s ability to be a portal to new states of being. Since 2020, I’ve been exploring a project titled Portals: Part One – Intuition. It’s a photographic exercise in what happens when I take large colorful lights into nature and allow my intuition to make all the artistic decisions (time of day, choosing the location, how I frame my images, and the color and placements of the lights). The resulting landscape images feel like portals to another world – they’re surreal, striking, and charged with possibility.

As an artist, I’ve always been interested in possibility and the internal landscape. For years I didn’t realize that’s what I was driven by or even what I was exploring – but when I look back at my early work, it’s a means of internal revelation. And I know how dramatic that sounds (she giggles), but I often don’t know what I’m making until after the fact. For me, letting my work unfold and surprise me is a means of organically synthesizing information. My artistic process flourishes when I intuitively make work and then unpack it like a detective. I find traces of the ideas I’m exploring, media I’m consuming, places I’ve visited, and artists of all mediums that I admire. It took me a long time to honor that my best work happens when I make art this way – by fully trusting my creative impulses and not intellectualizing my way through it. I still find this intimidating and scary but infinitely more rewarding and satisfying.

These days, my artistic practice explores a very tender corner of my internal landscape: my beliefs about reality. Outlining those beliefs is for another day and a different interview (or maybe a book), but I’ll leave you with this: reality is as moldable and magnificent as you’re willing to let it be.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’ve decided this itinerary takes place in September because one of Tucson’s seasonal highlights is our generous end-of-summer rainstorms. First, we’re starting in midtown at Prep & Pastry to eat brunch and enjoy decadent pastries. We’ll make our way downtown to enjoy an art exhibition at MOCA Tucson and go for a stroll to Owl’s Club for a drink. Another day, we’ll hike in Sabino Canyon (where there will inevitably be swimming holes because of monsoon season). We’ll frolic around in the water above the dam and pretend we’re whimsical water nymphs before watching the sunset and driving to Pho Ngan for Vietnamese food. The following day, we’ll go to Ding Tea and get fresh boba tea before heading to Etherton Gallery, Decode, and Andrew Smith Gallery. We’ll walk around the historic Barrio Viejo neighborhood and take our chances with the afternoon rainstorm. The next day we’ll catch a movie at The Loft then head to Ensenada Tacos before stopping at the Century Room for live music. Another day, we’ll get up early and go to an outdoor yoga class with Yoga Oasis at the Westward Look Resort. We’ll pick up some books at Bookmans and cozy up in Scented Leaf Tea’s downtown location before getting dinner at Zemam’s Too (on a Thursday for their Passport Global Dance Party hosted by DJ Herm). Another day, we’ll get lunch at Char’s Thai restaurant then head to Midtown Mercantile to shop vintage clothes, decor, and furniture. Afterwards we’ll head to 4th Ave for a walk and get a drink at the Royal Room. On our last day, we’ll take a rest from our city adventures and go to Mt Lemmon for a restorative day in nature. We’ll bring a picnic from Time Market and hike through the pine trees. We’ll feel childlike wonder about all the soft moss, delicate wildflowers, and secret little meadows only the locals know.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?

In 2018, I was an intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Tucson when the exhibition Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality, and the Occult in Contemporary Art debuted. It stirred up something in me that had been dormant for a long time: since early childhood, life had a side to it that felt mysterious – even magical. Even though I was exposed to a wide range of spiritual practices growing up, it always felt safer to be an intellectual. I fell into the trap of “be curious but not eccentric; an observer but not a true believer”. It takes a certain type of fortitude, vulnerability, and courage to truly say “I believe in this” and let people think what they will. But in 2018 when I sat at the reception desk during Blessed Be’s three month run, I realized how excited people were to see artwork that explored the Unseen. People walked into that exhibition with wide, curious eyes and left like they’d exhaled a breath they’d been holding in for years. I saw people tear up and bond over strange and whimsical stories that they’d never shared before. I saw the interpersonal connections people gained from moments of tender vulnerability. This exhibit gave me the permission I needed to let down my guard and explore a part of myself that I feared was too foolish to be acknowledged. I want to dedicate my shoutout to MOCA Tucson and Ginger Shulick Porcella who curated Blessed Be. Ginger – thank you for curating a space that inspired so many of us to step into the Unknown.

Website: https://www.welissamilliams.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/welissamilliams/

Image Credits
Genesis Sublette (portrait/feature photo) The rest are my artwork 🙂