Performances.
Once Upon a Time, Long Ago and Far Away: The Patient Remade in Lumiere Mount Victoria Festival of the Moving Image 2022
Combining a tabletop sculptural work of back-lit medical imaging displayed on modified Tupperware domestic containers, projection and a spoken word performance of fiction and non-fiction elements, this work dwells in the liminal space of the patient as an often-transitory player in the stratified world of the practice of medicine. The audience are encouraged to be participants in the dimly-lit, hushed, intimate space, reminiscent of a hospital ward. This unique experience offers audiences the opportunity to reflect, and question the nature and meaning of the seen and unseen, the observed and the experienced, in this liminal space.
Unfix Festival of Performance, Glasgow UK 2021
The Australian reading collective Before Bed gave two performances at the Unfix Festival. In one they read to the viewers in Glasgow just before their bedtime and in the other performance they were read to at their bedtime by members of the audience in Glasgow.
Racing Patience ICU at the Groundswell Conference, Fairmont Resort Hotel, Leura, Australia 2019
The card game Racing Patience ICU, was selected as one of the public programmes to be played at the Groundswell conference on death and dying at the Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains in 2019. The focus of the conference was arts and health or arts and death. The mission statement for the Groundswell project is for the organisation to ‘work with individuals, organisations and communities to improve how people in Australia die, care and grieve.’
This project Racing Patience ICU inhabits the transdisciplinary sites between science, technology and the arts. In this card game, the patient is comatose and has no agency, no ability to physically instruct the ICU team about their wishes. The characteristics of the end of life within an ICU are often driven by technology, and determined by what it is possible to attempt, not necessarily what is in the better interests of the patient. The process of dying is on occasion reported as excessively prolonged, painful and stressful for patients, families and medical staff. The ethics of the decisions made in this process can be questioned.
Performative Lectures at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 2019
A series of performative lectures were undertaken in the exhibition Cast a cold eye in life, in death: The Remake: Medicalised death in ICU.
This image is of the first stage in the lecture. While watching a simulation on a bedside medical monitor of a patient rupturing an abdominal aneurysm and bleeding out to death. Davies sits behind the audience to read a fairy story, an oral history given by an ICU nurse about one patient and her death. This oral history is quoted from 'David Crippen, End-of-Life Communication in the ICU: A Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2008): 52.'
Racing Patience ICU at Holding Space, The Kiosk, Katoomba, Australia 2018
Holding Space, a group exhibition was curated by Danica Knezevic as the third of three residencies plus exhibitions as part of the MAPBM Kiosk 3 x 6 project. The curator, Danica Knezevic selected this work Racing Patience ICU, 2017-2018, canvas, paint, printed matter found objects and performance, developed during the residency for this exhibition. In the catalogue Knezevic wrote that - Holding Space is an exhibition of performative experiences that consider the transference of the self through empathy. The performances and installations developed by the five artists relate to the themes of the body and care-giving, including participation and interaction, self-care, concern for the other and a relational space for accessibility and participation.