Site-Specific
Caravan Sarai, 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 tope 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 passersby'.
Casula Arts Centre, Casula, Sydney, 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.
Cementa 13, 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.
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.’
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.
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..
School of Physics, University of Sydney, Foyer Museum 2010.
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.
Sculpture in the Vineyards, Wollombi, 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.
Tufts University, Boston, USA. - Silk Biomedical and Engineering Labs 2014
This was not a public exhibition – it could only be seen by those who worked in this particular set of scientific laboratories within the silk laboratory at Tufts University Boston where they ‘.. study the use of silk as an optical material for applications in biomedical engineering, photonics and nano photonics’
This installation intervened into a process necessary and common within science, that of moving and reorganising equipment from one space to another. In transition a stack of materials lay in the middle of the floor of the analytical laboratory This floor to ceiling installation of silk paper framed this pile of stuff refocusing on the ephemeral nature of the administrative process within the practice of the scientific method. On the last day everything had been moved on leaving a solitary Allen key within the space designated by the silk paper.
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.’
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.”
The Kiosk Katoomba Australia 2017
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.
Woodford Academy, A National Trust Property, Woodford, 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.’