Aaron Williamson: Wild Boy

For Wild Boy the artist Aaron Williamson inhabited The Showroom gallery for a period of six weeks to enact the figure of Victor Aveyron, a child found to be living in the wild in southern France at the end of the eighteenth century.

Wild Boy considers the enigmatic figure of Victor and what his legacy to deaf people and culture might have been. In a world in which physical perfection becomes more and more of an ideal, Williamson has made a powerful comment on the history and importance of difference. Williamson's approach as an artist is formed around a desire to deconstruct the behavioural norms and orthodoxies of society. Through often purposefully irrational, unusual or even anti-social behaviour and action, performance can reveal how ideas of social rectitude are maintained. His work is driven by preoccupations concerning the way in which meaning is constructed and transmitted though language and the way in which hearing and gesture interact and define our relationships with one another. Wild Boy extended these preoccupations further by questioning the distinctions between individual and collective freedoms, and moral and sensual values today.