William Furlong

William Furlong was born in Woking, Surrey, in 1944. He studied at Guildford School of Art and Crafts (1960-65) and then at the Royal Academy Schools in London (1965-68). Like most artists of his generation, on leaving college Furlong worked part-time in art schools in order to support his studio practice. He taught at Epsom School of Art, at Ealing School of Art, and then at Wimbledon School of Art where he is now a member of the professorial research staff, working with postgraduate and research students in fine art. On establishing his studio as…

William Furlong was born in Woking, Surrey, in 1944. He studied at Guildford School of Art and Crafts (1960-65) and then at the Royal Academy Schools in London (1965-68). Like most artists of his generation, on leaving college Furlong worked part-time in art schools in order to support his studio practice. He taught at Epsom School of Art, at Ealing School of Art, and then at Wimbledon School of Art where he is now a member of the professorial research staff, working with postgraduate and research students in fine art.

On establishing his studio as a young graduate, Furlong continued to paint and to make sculpture, having started to make his first three-dimensional and mixed media work at the Royal Academy. Important exhibitions for him during the late 1960s were the New Contemporaries at the Tate Gallery 1967 and the Northern Ireland Open and John Moore's Liverpool exhibitions in 1969. In 1973 William Furlong established Audio Arts, a two-stranded project in which he recorded, edited and published (under the label Audio Arts) conversations of artists, and produced sound works. It was his intention from the outset that Audio Arts should be a creative project, and the two activities continue to overlap, each enriching the other. This was Furlong's first substantial involvement with the voice. His sound works were exhibited in a series of exhibitions, including Art for Society 1978 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and The Sculpture Show at the Hayward Gallery in 1982. Exhibitions in 1998 included a solo exhibition in the Bregenz Kunstverein; Sound Garden at the Serpentine Gallery, London; and An Imagery of Absence at the Imperial War Museum.

Furlong finds that his way of working - using sounds and the voice as materials - is a sculptural and creative process. It arose from his intimate association with the voice when editing interviews which are for him actual constructions.