1995
The installation That’s such a pretty dress dear, version two’, was included in the exhibition Its Two to One at Lewers at Penrith Regional Gallery: Home of the Lewers Bequest . The detials of the work are 1995, rope, found objects, fabric, and paint, dimensions variable.
The arts academic and curator Lee-Ann Hall wrote in the exhibition catalogue essay about this work - ‘In response to the perceivable absence of women from Australia’s historiography Fiona Davies has created a memorial to the pitiful blurring of individual female lives. her tribute is not chiselled or cemented, but rendered instead using old seats prised from kitchen and dining furniture. Now converted into hanging swings, these seats which have borne the weight of many, are empty.
Twenty five seats attached to the ceiling are almost imperceptibly swaying. In the corner a fan whirls churning up the air, making a breezeway and conjuring the presence of the long absent. Placed upon these seats are cushions, made of black rich and patterned fabrics, ruched, pleated and embroidered. A complex of ever subtle shades of black resound with the black of velvet nights, the black of mourning, the blackness of repression, the black of satiny sheets, and none the least to ‘ our glorious dead’ black. bearing Gold script these cushions and seats are inscribed with the names of women and well worn phrases. The sum of women’s lives are noted with biographical scraps; born married died. The drab similarity of female life is repeated as if part of a funerary roll-call, Tottie and Queenie, Merle, Edith and Olive. What did their lives amount to ? Why should they have our attention? What dynasty’s have they created? Where have their battles been fought? Their skills who knows? Their legacy may be children, their worldly goods few.
Teetering between melancholy and bitterness, between solemnity and playfulness, this is a deeply ambivalent memorial. It resonates of soft, cushiony womanhood, of grandmothers and great aunts but also of the thin lipped, white gloved manners of a period where women were bound to each other yet forced to compete within a restrictive social order. Conspiratorial and gossipy homilies, ‘she’s made her bed, now she will have to lie in it’, mutton dressed as lamb’ and vanity doesn’t feel the cold’, are epithets to a past not yet receded.
These snug and ugly expressions between women are in attempt to control, jockey and position for a place in the world. They are made comprehensible with a broad recognition of patriarchal power which maintains women as competitors for male favour. In the absence of feminism’s sisterhood women turn upon themselves, tearing their own gender’s flesh. The agents of female oppression goes untrammelled and in its place self-destructive behaviour is played out. Evidenced here is the notion that women as an oppressed group, often do not resist the institutional means of their oppression, but overwhelmed seemingly greater forces, their struggles are localised and somewhat misdirected.
