Essay by Elin Howe
Memorial/Double Pump Laplace St Marks, Aberdeen (May/June 06)
Water/Flower of Another Esa Jaske Gallery, Chippendale (14/6/06 – 8/7/06)
Exhibited within weeks of one another, Fiona Davies’ two recent installations Memorial/Double Pump Laplace at St Marks, Aberdeen and Water/Flower of Another at Esa Jaske Gallery, Chippendale appear as almost antithetical in both subject matter and style – one, intensely personal, memorialises Davies’ father by retracing the experience of witnessing his final illness; while the other takes a more dispassionate position to examine the material and symbolic legacy of the exotic camellia as it has travelled between cultures. In appearance too, both bodies of work seem very different. The work about her father’s death achieves its impact through a pared down aesthetic mobilising prosaic details which frame daily rituals of hospital care. The camellia work communicates its message via a technique of seduction, swamping the senses with a heady mix of luxe surfaces and subtle hues. Appearing within weeks of each other, these two exhibitions invite comparison because their overt difference pricks our innate curiosity about the creative process. How do such dissimilar exhibitions from the same hand/heart/head evolve and come to fruition in the same time frame?
Both exhibitions fit loosely within the parameters of the exhibiting pattern Davies has established over the past decade alternating her installation work between historic sites where she interrogates the given history of the place and creates a memorial to the forgotten or overlooked participants, and conventional art spaces where aesthetics are privileged. Despite the different weighting in these two types of exhibiting strategies, the conceptual connections between the two strands of work are usually apparent. Not so with these two exhibitions.
Memorial/Double Pump Laplace
Davies’ visual practice in historic sites has always deployed the given meaning of the site in her critical reinterpretations of history. This exhibition can be seen as a shift within this practice because it mobilises medical discourse off-site so to speak. Installed in the small rural church where Davies’ family events have historically been celebrated, this work addresses the hospital and its attendant rituals. These are conjured to keen effect at the place which comes after medical intervention has failed – the site of the funeral.
Nestling between the pews we find functional stainless steel furniture – the hospital trolley and the instrument table/bed – as vehicles for a carefully edited assortment of visual cues. The dreary ordinariness of hospital grounds is laid bare in a series of photographs arranged with surgical precision on the antiseptic steel surface; red crosses made of buttons wired to fat spatter catchers dangle from a metal frame invoking the blood transfusion bags which attend a serious blood loss event; hand-painted copies of The Australian logo on folded broadsheet-size papers lie in a neat pile; and on another bedside metal trolley sits a small painting of a bunch of stocks. Within the lofty space of the church, these modestly proportioned elements are unified as part of the overall installation by Davies’ treatment of the pew kneelers. Around every kneeler is a wrapping of grey felt and at the aisle end of each kneeler, appliqued on to the felt, are numbers indicating blood pressure, heart rate and oxygenation readings.
A distinguishing hallmark of Davies’ work in historic sites has been its visual restraint. Through a careful and thorough conceptual process she edits her elements with haiku-like precision. This work is also made in that model. Despite the incongruity of the work’s clinical appearance in the church context, the existing sight-lines within the space remain uninterrupted. Rather than being struck by the installation the viewer comes upon it gradually. Its story unfolds. Universal meanings – stainless steel trolley equals hospital – sit side by side with recognisably specific individual meanings – we may not know the intimate details behind the painting of the stocks, but we see enough to understand it is personally significant in this story. In the mix of visual elements we gradually comprehend that we are seeing a long death. There was time for the family to become familiar with the medical lexicon and read the patient’s condition each day from the bedside cues. There was time for the red crosses on blood bags to become naturalised as part of the daily experience, for a history of blood pressure, heart rate and oxygenation readings to build, and for newspapers to accumulate. In all of these signs an anxious family reads hope.
Davies’ strategy is to replicate the dawning knowledge that accumulates in the attendant family as it strives to accommodate what is happening in the hospital context. We, the viewers, slowly recognise that desperate hope, hope that this loved body will not leave us. But, because of where we are, the outcome is poignantly clear.
Once again the meaning of the exhibition site is pivotal in our process of making meaning from Davies’ work. What distinguishes this work from her other memorial work is that the central issue is not justice – righting the wrongs of history. Rather it is something far more elusive – the nature of grief. Davies’ long practice of interrogating given histories by means of thorough research and deft but sparing use of visual cues has established a useful framework for her explorations into the abstract territory of grief. Previously she has balanced substantiated facts with her own knowledge of subjective experience to conjure the historically invisible and humanise her protagonists. In Memorial/Double Pump Laplace the research approach is evident in the title which alludes to the scientist whose theories inform the design of a medical procedure used in her father’s treatment. Becoming as conversant as possible with the medical jargon and technology surrounding his treatment also speaks to her research impulse, but overwhelmingly the conceptual content in this body of work is informed by her subjective experience of grief. If there’s a critical interrogation occurring, it’s into the common perceptions of grief.
The iconography of grief tends to represent it as we witness it experienced by others rather than as a feeling we directly experience. Often the representations invite us to empathise with the grief-stricken. Within this tradition the bowed figure has become a ubiquitous signifier and it is present here too the church fittings – carved representations of the Stations of the Cross. The last image in this series – Christ’s limp body, suspended between two bowed figures, being tenderly lowered to rest – is an image we recognise as representing grief as we witness it. These visual traditions have no currency in the spare and measured aesthetic of Davies’ representations. Rather her investigation of grief focuses on the subjective experience as she recreates the everydayness, the ordinariness of daily hospital visiting, the ongoing regular routines which permit a form of certainty in the face of unpredictable catastrophe. Anyone who has attended a loved one through a long and final illness knows that it’s during these periods of apparent calm that intense impressions are burned into the memory. After death, these unexceptional scenes often haunt the mourner. They are the final experiences with the exceptional human being who is now gone. Davies uses her established sparse visual language to identify these ordinary experiences and legitimate them for what they become to the mourner – extraordinary experiences.
Water/Flower of Another
Water/Flower of Another appearing only days after the close of the previous show was surprisingly different. The compact front space at Esa Jaske literally glowed in a rich warm bone coloured wallpaper. Intermittently a text – the camellia felt the rain – was repeated in hand-painted lettering on the wallpaper. Blooming on the walls of this small space were five large squarish stylised images of outsized camellias. Made in layered cut-work on stretched de-lustred satin of an indeterminate subtle hue, their surfaces shimmered as they picked up reflected light and movement. Perched on a stool within the space was a sewing box containing scans of camellias in various stages of decay mounted on wooden blocks to form a grid of camellia images. Underneath the blocks another cut-out of a pink camellia covered the box floor.
In the short narrative and explanatory statement accompanying the list of works we learn that a pink camellia grew, rather unhappily in full sun, by the front gate of Davies’ childhood home. Despite its sickly appearance it survived because every year for a short time it yielded a harvest of blooms. Floating in a Japanese bowl, they were used by Davies’ mother as the central decorative feature on the dining room table. The rest of the text described the eighteenth century migratory history of camellias as they travelled from the Orient to the Occident as part of the colonial enterprise.
Colonial discourse has long fascinated Davies. Her growing son’s Tongan heritage precipitated an investigation into the patterns and cultural currency of the Pacific in the late ’90s. It was at this time that the small shell buttons, now such a signature in her work, appeared. In the nineteenth century they were a marker of the imperial harvests of exotic new materials available in the New World. In our time real shell buttons have been replaced by a facsimile pearlised plastic model. Their exoticism has disappeared. We see them as a normal part of western attire – shirt buttons. Davies has used both the real and facsimile versions in her work. Their meanings vary according to the scale and site in which they are used.
Given her own anglo-celtic heritage, an interest in the dynamic of relationships at the interface of Pacific cultures was, and continues to be apparent in her work. One of her concerns has been the legitimacy of using the motifs which traditionally signify another culture or another time in history. As we see with the shell buttons, meanings attached to motifs shift with use. Meanings attached to the camellia have shifted significantly. Since its introduction to the west in the eighteenth century, as a plant ergo a design motif indicating the exotic, it has gradually become a signifier for anglo-celtic gentility. But genteel is not an adjective to describe these big camellia wall-pieces. Their scale, reinforced by the tiny space at Esa Jaske, interrupts that reading.
These luscious works installed in such a compact space appear to have no connection either conceptually or aesthetically with the previous exhibition until one steps back to look at the history of Davies’ practice. Previously her historical interrogations have helped her to identify the most unassuming of domestic motifs to carry her message. She has then gone on to liberate them from those specific histories by re-deploying them in work whose focus is on aesthetics. In a gallery space their signifying power multiplies into a polyvalent chorus inspiring new ideas and uses for the motifs. In this way she has developed her own visual language and maintained her creative momentum over two decades. Davies is one of a growing number of artists who use the veracity of their own subjective experience/memories as a tool to challenge objective knowledge.
With the elegiac work on her father, instead of interrogating historical discourse, she has moved into investigating the discourse around grief. After the death of a loved one, the mourner is initially haunted by the period just prior to death. It takes some time for the whole life to come into perspective. When it does, certain memories surface which make us grateful to have shared the life now gone.
If viewed in this light, the camellia work, as well as continuing her investigation into post-colonial discourse, starts to look like the next step in the examination of the grieving process. The small shirt button and the pink camellia undoubtedly both play a part in Davies’ memory of her happy anglo-celtic childhood. In Memorial/Double Pump Laplace she pays tribute to her last memories of her father using, among others, the button, a motif which has served her well for a decade or more. In Water/Flower of Another a new motif emerges from the memory bank of childhood to pay tribute to that happy time. The overt mention of her mother’s delight in the annual blush of camellias in the float bowl can also be read as an acknowledgement of her role in this period of her life.
