2005
Museums and Galleries
Esa Jaske Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Water/Flower of Another
Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
The work Ice/Plain as a Glass of Water was selected by the curator Sophie McIntyre for the exhibition Breaking Ice: Re-Visioning Antarctica. This exhibition ‘ sets out to identify how Antarctica has been framed and indeed exorcised in the media, museum displays and popular culture.’
Sophie McIntyre wrote in her catalogue essay that ‘ In Ice/Plain as a Glass of Water, Fiona Davies provides a counterpoint to the history of heroism , which is typically gendered as masculine and defined by a ‘pioneering spirit’. In Antarctica, domestic life, particularly sewing and cooking, were central to the survival of these explorers. In a note to his Fiancee, Frederick Hooper , a member of Scott’s expedition writes, ‘I’ve washed all my clothes, about half a dozen suits of underclothes and have been mending them today. I can tell you I can do anything with a needle’ Ice/Plain as a Glass of Water, comprising panels of perforated zinc, such as those used to store meat, onto which thousands of pearly white buttons are sewn, celebrates the everyday on Antarctica and it also responds to the physical landscape. The buttons form a white shimmering seductive surface which, like the terrain, alters with light and movement - a space shaped by melting and shifting sea ice; sliced by a horizon line made invisible by whiteout or iceblink - it is a point of transition.
Emma Prendergast wrote in a review published in Salient that ‘ A personal favourite, Fiona Davies’ work invites her audience to cast away the popular notions of the bravery of the explorers,. instead offering a counterpoint to the heroic masculine. Referencing the everyday activities many of the explorers were forced to undertake, Davies uses buttons in a 90 -zinc panel work to celebrate previously hidden stories of domesticity within the myths of heroic exploration
The other artists in the exhibition were Stella Brennan, Phil Dadson and James Charlton, Stephen Easthaugh, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anne Noble, Stuart Shepherd and David Stephenson.
Oceania Centre, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji
Memorial/Hanky Found objects and fabric 6000x 4500mm 2005
In this work a link is formed between the personal and the public in that my history and that of my family is combined with other people’s family histories and with those of anonymous former owners, the absence of history, to form this work. The work consists of two lengths of sheer fabric overlaid with incomplete grids of women’s handkerchiefs each only sewn along the top edge. This allows the handkerchiefs to move slightly with the viewer’s movement or to be picked up and examined or just to be played with. The size of the work [4.5 m (h) x 6m (l) x 1.5m (d)] encourages the reading of the work as a heroic type memorial where it could almost be imagined that each handkerchief belongs to a different woman each of whom was individualised and remembered in this work.
The twenty metres of base sheer white fabric was bought in Cabramatta in Sydney with a quiltmaker friend giving advice. The handkerchiefs were sourced from my family, various people who donated theirs or their relatives’, one was appropriated by someone working in a nursing home, some came from garage sales and others from opportunity shops. When the handkerchiefs were handed to me they were generally accompanied by a story about the owner, how they came to acquire the handkerchief, if someone else had given them this handkerchief and details of significant occasions on which the handkerchief had been used. Interestingly, people tended to say that the handkerchiefs had just been sitting in chests of drawers, no longer used and that, they wanted to see them ’put to a good use’ by being incorporated into this work.
One of the narratives behind a group of three handkerchiefs is that these, three brightly coloured, two orange and one green, handkerchiefs were in the handbag of one woman’s grandmother when during her absence her house burnt down largely destroying all her other possessions except what she was wearing and the objects in her handbag. The richness of these stories about the contextualised handkerchiefs brings the absence of narrative around the anonymous purchases and donations into relief.
The presence of each handkerchief is marked. When studying each shape, each border, each pattern, one is aware of the multiplicity of these women’s lives and the fluidity of the movement of these women from one context to another and the identities that accompany that change in context. Interestingly most of these handkerchiefs came from either Australia or New Zealand but about fifteen in total were either donated or bought in Portland, Oregon, USA. They are very different. Maybe different dyestuffs were used, but the designs even of the handmade embroidered ones are different. One formal aspect of this work which surprised me and tripped me up during the making is that it is very rare for any of these handkerchiefs to be actually square.
The ritual of the use of handkerchiefs by women is declining in Australia and to a large extent has been reduced to ceremonial use only. When older women are placed in nursing homes or other forms of aged care where they can no longer undertake their personal washing, handkerchiefs tend to be no longer used This may be convenience, its hard to name and track them through an institutional laundry system, [although there are examples in the work of really delicate lace handkerchiefs boldly named using thick black texta], it may be hygiene, handkerchiefs keep the germs in your pocket, - or it just part of that stripping away of personal possessions that is part of the processes of aged or institutional care.
2004
Museums and Galleries
Esa Jaske Gallery, Chippendale, Sydney Australia
Ice/Plain as a glass of water was shown in the project space of the Esa Jaske Gallery in Sydney.
2003
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
2002
Museums and Galleries
One only The Physics Room Christchurch New Zealand
Sydney artist Fiona Davies works site specifically, often in historic homesteads in Australia, creating works which utilize the morass of household debris of former residents, transforming the domestic and the everyday objects into installations which simultaneously pay homage to, and critique, the lives of the previous occupants.
Davies ’s work for the Physics Room has been developed in conjunction with the Canterbury Museum, utilizing artifacts from the Museum’s collection, creating work which sits in an ambiguous position within art and museum practice, and questioning the location of meaning in traditional ethnographic practice which privileges object over context