Site-Specific Solo and Group Exhibitions, Screenings and Performances.
Twenty-Seven Days of Blood on Silk: Trade that became Thirty Days of Blood on Silk: Trade in 2023 in the street window of Lyttleton Stores in NSW Australia
An exhibition of twenty seven and then thirty videos were shown in the window gallery space at Lyttleton Stores in Lawson NSW Australia from March 3rd 2023 to April 3rd 2023. A new video was shown every day
The videos could be seen twenty four hours a day from the footpath outside and inside during opening hours. They were also shown for those thirty days on the home page of this website and on my linked in page.
The videos were shot in the hardware retail district of Beyoglu in Istanbul. The work is meditative, almost abstracted, shot from a single position looking down six floors to the street below where three hardware shops are opening up for the morning’s trade. The choreography of the street is revealed as each shop prepares their public face for their customers, their trade. That given moment of the day is entered into, observed and felt. Co-incidences of repeated actions are observed and noted. Only in one video did I come down to film on the street. One Sunday on a largely unpopulated street the role of the filmaker was acknowledged and greeted.
Blood on Silk: Field of Flowers reconfigured for Kandos Projects, Kandos NSW Australia 2022
This work from 2013 was reconfigured for exhibition in Kandos Projects in a small town in the Mid West in NSW Australia.. This project space, consists of the four shop windows in a former haberdashery in a row of shops which include a real estate agent, a craft supply shop, and an opportunity shop which at the time of the exhibition is displaying seven or eight small sewing baskets in their windows. All of the basket lids in that display are closed.
Is that Cocteau’s Horse? at Carnivale Catastrophe presented by MAPBM at the festival Cementa22 plus the online video Once upon a time, long ago and far away: Being moved from one place to another presented at Spirit of 21, 2022 and 2021
Details of the Work: Is that Cocteau’s Horse? 2022, installation, video, silk assemblages and costumes, metal meat hooks and steel rail size variable
Cementa Moments at the Kiosk coincided with Cementa-17 in Kandos NSW. A selection of works from the previous Cementa exhibitions were reshown in different types of locations within the Kiosk that resulted in the works being read in quite different ways. This work Blood on Silk: Price taker/price maker originally part of Cementa-15 held onto its sleazy, dodgy and creepy feel as the sale of blood and body parts moved in a poorly cleaned commercial kitchen. It felt as if the products offered for auction such as bags of human blood and plasma could be confused with quite ordinary kitchen supplies.
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker reconfigured for the exhibition Cementa Moments at The Kiosk Katoomba Australia 2017
Painting the Throat, 2017, zinc,found objects, rice and other papers, iodine and ink, dimensions variable was installed in the group exhibition Explorers Narratives of Site in Contemporary Art Practices curated by Beata Geyer and Mahalya Middlemist in the National Trust of Australia property Woodford Academy, Woodford, NSW, Australia. In the exhibition catalogue Jacqueline Millner, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University writes; ‘Fiona Davies reimagines and revitalises lost histories too, in this case bringing her sensitivity around the medicalisation of vulnerable people to the boy boarders once resident here. Davies has rendered the basins in the boys’ washroom into pathology slides: as we peer down, we catch a glimpse of disease and possible institutional responses to it, gaining a visceral sense of how these young bodies were once patrolled and controlled.’
Painting the Throat in the exhibition Explorers at Woodford Academy, A National Trust Property, Woodford, Australia 2017
The work Last Seen was selected by the curator Lizzy Marshall for the First Turbine Hall Commission at Casula Powerhouse, Casula, Sydney, Australia. The turbine hall at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia is the first space entered by the visitor. It is large, at first glance it is apparently empty, a space approximately 13.8 metres high by 12.7 metres wide and 26.5 metres deep. The ground floor of the hall is the site of multiple points of transition and multiple points of decision making, some of which relate directly to the architecture and some to the usual patterns or paths of passage in this architectural space resulting in an invisible crisscrossing pattern of use. As in most hospitals once you enter the doors you have to make a decision about where you are going and it maybe the last time you are seen. Photo credit A Todic
Last Seen at Casula Arts Centre,
Casula, Sydney, Australia 2017
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker was reconfigured for this exhibition of site specific installations by the curator Lizzy Marshall. Sited in a heritage building, the Forge in the middle of the town of Wollombi, the country origins of the auctioneer were reinforced., the floor was rough and unlevel, the walls were partially complete and it looked like a fly by night operation. That this operation was auctioning blood and blood products with an expectation of hygiene and professionalism was neither here nor there but it was not what we were getting.
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker in the exhibition Sculpture in the Vineyards, Wollombi, Australia 2017
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker (sound only) reconfigured for the exhibition Experiment during the conference Control at the University of Stockholm, Sweden June 14-17 2016
The curator, Dehlia Hannah selected the work Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker for the series of site specific installations. Hannah described this exhibition on her website as ‘The concept of experiment is governed by competing ideals of control and playful freedom. While the controlled experiment is widely regarded as the gold standard of the natural sciences, the aspiration to control, direct, test and constrain novel operations is also prominent in artistic, social and political practices of experimentation. The experimentalism of the arts, where to experiment connotes defiance of rigid norms and expectations and an openness to indeterminacy and even failure, likewise finds its counterpart in the exploratory dimension of scientific research. The dark legacies of authoritarian political experiments likewise stand in tension with the emancipatory promises of liberal ‘experiments in living.’
Multiple works in the project/exhibition at Das KloHäuschen and Villa Walberta, Munich, Germany 2016
Two exhibitions, four video nights on site, artist talk off site + residency’. Das KloHäuschen is the site of a former urinal adjacent to the main fruit and vegetable markets in the city of Munich in Germany. The wholesale food market in Munich is a site of economic activity where people are buying and selling, making deals and negotiating. So I found with KloHäuschen which is situated directly beside the Wholesale Market, a perfect place to speculate about a possible future process of selling blood, the auction. An economic process clearly showing the interaction between the buyers and the sellers.
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker in the festival Cementa 15, Kandos, NSW Australia 2015
The work Blood on Silk: Price Taker / Price Maker, 2015 was installed in the Dabee Nursery and Bric a Brac store on the eastern edge of town after I selected for the group exhibiotn, residency and engagement of Cementa 15. The arts writer and critic Gina Fairley wrote for Hub in 2015 an article titled ‘Cementa15 - a regional festival in pictures Twenty good reasons to put Cementa on your radar - a festival that happens every two years in regional NSW. She wrote in the article that ‘One of the more powerful works in Cementa15 was Fiona Davies’ work from her Blood on Silk series. Stacked in your typical tin shed at the Dabee Road Nursery, this installation combined a sound element of an auction of medical supplies - blood and plasma - what Davies said is not dissimilar to an agricultural auction.’
Multiple works and events in the project/exhibition Caravansarai, Istanbul, Turkey 2011, 2012 and 2013
Three exhibitions, numerous artist talks and three residency periods'. The interplay between the roles of observer, observed, the outsider and the everyday were explored by Fiona Davies in three month long residencies at Caravansarai in Istanbul. Orhan Pamuk expressed these tensions in his memoir, Istanbul, Memories and the City . He describes how when his cousin opened the window, ' … it was usually to spit on the roof of a car struggling up to the slope of the alley, or throw a nail or a firecracker he had skilfully attached to a string. Even today, whenever I am at a high window that looks out onto the street, I can’t help wondering how it would feel to spit down on the passersby'.
The multi panelled work Blood on Silk: Surgery was commissioned for the foyer of the Science Building at Macquarie University in 2013. The work, made of satin ribbon adn painted canvas brings together many scientific concepts and paraphernalia. Diffraction grates, photonics, forensics, medical practices such as surgery, blood as a material, blood as record, the history of the barber’s pole, and the mutation are all brought together in this work.
Blood on Silk: Surgery commissioned for the foyer of the Science Faculty Building, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia 2013
Cane in the festival Cementa13, Kandos NSW Australia 2013
Cane, 2012 video was commissioned by Cementa as a site specific work in the Kandos Museum local history section. In the video, Cane, individuals tell their stories supported by a sound track of scales being practised on an out of tune piano. The visual imagery is a a sequence of the palms of the hands of those sharing their stories. Each palm is the site on which a form of school punishment known as the cuts was practised. The student being punished held out their hand palm up and was hit with a cane for a specified number of times depending on the required severity of punishment. The stories are of applied justice, accepted, rejected and/or still resented.
Blood on Silk: Kandos at Kandos Projects, Kandos NSW Australia 2011
‘In the front window of Kandos projects sits the installation Blood on Silk: Kandos. This sparse and elegant work in a small Australian country town is the fourth in the Blood on Silk series. The veils of silk paper work to define and yet conceal the fine architectural structure of the shop front. What is often not observed – the metal bars framing the windows, the small blue tiles of the walls and the multi-coloured tiles of the walkways – were brought to the fore by partially obscuring the clear glass in the windows. The fragments of reflections of the street also work to layer the experience of disorientation from the architecture of the space. Through the reflection of the viewer and the street behind it is possible to see a hospital trolley with a backlit retail light box displaying blood stains in one of the four glass bays. Blood on Silk continues to examine the pairing of the seemingly unrelated’.
The third work in the Memorial/ Double Pump Laplace , site-specific series was installed in the foyer of the Physics Building at the University of Sydney. The Building was designed by the architect Leslie Wilkinson in 1925. The other two site-specific works in this series can be found under St Marks Church Aberdeen NSW Australia and Lincoln College Oxford University UK. Memorial/Double Pump Laplace II, was a site specific installation, based on narratives from the dying of my father, in hospital in 2001. The work is an intersection between the experiences of the rituals of blood matching, sampling and testing and a current research project by physicist Dr. Peter Domachuk, looking into the development of silk implantable biophotonic chips allowing real time measurement of the properties of blood while that blood is within the body. In the body's circulatory system relatively impermeable membranes are often selectively permeable; objects make their own way where they choose and in their own time. Some things pass and some are caught or retained. The silk covers on the museum cabinets are translucent rather than perfectly transparent as in the biophotonic chips and so limit the amount of visual information that is allowed to pass encouraging a new way of seeing or of accessing information.
Memorial/Double Pump Laplace II, at the School of Physics, University of Sydney, Foyer Museum 2010.
Memorial/Double Pump Laplace III in the chapel of Lincoln College, Oxford University, UK 2009
The second work in this series was installed in the chapel of Lincoln College at the Oxford University UK in 2009, The details of the work are Memorial/Double Pump Laplace III, 2009, installation, photographs, sound and found objects. The other two site-specific works in this series can be found under School of Physics, University of Sydney and St Marks Church Aberdeen NSW Australia..
Parramatta Park and grounds of Old Government House, Parramatta, Sydney 2008
In a collaborative work with the artist Patricia Prociv the process of grass painting was used to examine Parramatta’s formal town plan from 1799 during the time of Governor Hunter. During that time there were significant food shortages for the non idigenous population. Governor Hunter’s front garden was turned over to the productin of food such as potatoes, cabage and turnips. Over time the work faded and each subsequent mowing reduced the number of fragments of the work until it became bewildering.
Memorial/Double Pump Laplace I, at St Mark’s Anglican Church, Aberdeen, Australia 2006
The first of this series of works was installed in the Anglican Church in Aberdeen in NSW Australia. The details of the work are Memorial/Double Pump Laplace I, 2006, installation, textile, found objects, thread and buttons. One of major issues considered in this installation is the domestication of the daily rituals of intensive care including the taking blood samples. Marian Benjamin in the 2006 catalogue accompanying Memorial / Double Pump Laplace I wrote of that work. “Once you know your way around you no longer need to read the signs, they are just there, part of everyday life, habitual. And there is comfort in habit……… Death too is unremarkable. We all die. It is an experience of which we are all aware. And yet our experience of death, of loss, of grief is far from unremarkable.”
In one of four small terraces making up Susannah Place in the Rocks, the Hughes family were long term residents in the early twentieth century. The installation Missing Untold rewrote the history of that families’ occupation of the space back into the site. As the arts writer Elin Howe wrote in the catalogue ‘ Through her economic, but carefully considered fusion of motifs, Davies has, via her appropriation of the curatorial mechanisms, successfully elided museum and arts practice to produce a believable and entertaining glimpse into the Hughes years at number 58. in her style of historical recuperation she privileges the idiosyncratic character of her subjects without any recourse to aestheticising of romanticising them.
