1994
Untitled, 1994, found objects, paint dimensions variable installed in the Spiral Arm Gallery, Kingston ACT Australia
The academic Marion Benjamin wrote in the catalogue that ‘ Fiona Davies’ sculptures remember those anonymous generations of women that have existed only as so many cut out dolls. The act of naming, or renaming and the record of births and deaths reclaims for them a place in history, A picture is built up, a photo montage that is made of layers, one upon the other, a story over time. But for me the greatest power of this work is the way in which their almost palpable presence is achieved ironically through their bodily absence- in the dresses they wore. These are the textures which caressed and constrained her body. The dress she danced in, the dress she slowly removed under loving caresses, the dress she laboured in. With its traces of sweat, of bodily warmth, of the wrinkled and tattered weft of ageing skin - small details of adornment which signify her pleasures and pain - it is the text which survived to tell her story.
and if so much dead wood now adorns our institutional walls plotting those other privileged histories. Fiona’s clever play with the functional objects of women’s work, and of their abodes, brings back a dynamism to this form of historical remembering - the action she saw at he ironing board in the service of self, family and community.