2012
Museums and Galleries
James Hockey Gallery, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham, U.K.
Blood on Silk: Farnham, 2010-2012, Silk paper, video and found objects, Dimensions variable
In the speech to open this exhibition Professor Simon Olding of the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham said
Here, in the James Hockey Gallery, Fiona Davies has made a deeply contemplative, but also in its serene and powerfully considered way, rousing and challenging work. It is both rooted in this one place and complex in its multiple metaphors. These are personal and broadly human, subjective as well as elemental. Our entry into this major work feels like a private journey, an unfolding, wrapping and wafting; a breathing of life and loss. It is an extraordinary work both for its repetitive and mnemomic associations and its strength of sheen, its tearings and gossamered power; its whiteness and the mark of blood adjacent to the white papered hanging.
…
Fiona Davies has worked with the most precious material – the thoughts of her father’s death – and considered its meanings in the light of the ideas of blood sampling and the measurement of blood properties. This is both science and elegy. Blood on Silk, a work of keening, has become, through reflective care and visionary making, the means of transformation of place as well as concept; of respect and challenge; and a means of driving forward a new language for textiles in the public gallery realm. It is an internationalist and progressive collaboration.
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland, NSW Australia
Memorial / Time of Death No. 3, 2008, print on paper, 90 x 110 (h) cm
In a group exhibition that was the brain child of the art philanthropist Pat Corrigan, thirty two artists selected which of their own works were to be part of the exhibition Inspiring Artists: Recipients of the Pat Corrigan Artists’ Grant. The intention of the exhibition was to show the contemporary art of artists who ‘received the encouragement, validation and the grant dollars early in their careers’. The dollar value of the artists grant was initially $200 and later was increased to $500.
The other artists in the exhibition were Brett Alexander, Michelle Brodie, Helga Groves, Juli Haas, Peter Hennessey, Peter Pinson, Steven Alderton, Anne Ferran, Patricia Piccinini, Nike Savvas, Louise Paramor, Kate Shaw, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Lionel Bawden, Barbara Licha, Donwang Fan, Cressida Goddard, Nell, Braddon Snape, Claudia Damichi, David Jolly, Yvonne Kendall, Belinda Fax, Karlee Rawkins, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, John Nicholson, Sherrie Knipe, Mari Hirata, Mandana Mapar and Danielle Thompson.
Museums and Galleries and Curatorial
Parramatta Artists Studios, Parramatta, Sydney Australia
Death 3, I don’t Think we’re in Kansas Anymore was the third and final exhibition at Parramatta Artist Studios in this series thinking about death. As Ann Finnegan wrote in her catalogue essay;
This, the final exhibition of a trilogy… startles with its premise of ‘relationships with a body, the body of the deceased. the very work relationship conjures closeness, intimacy, live negotiations entered into, engagements of live bodies among the land of the living. Indeed the work relationships enters into a certain ongoing-ness. Therefore it’s strange , even arresting to think of a relationship with the dead body.
‘A body was found.. we indicate a corpse. Consort with the dead, you breach a taboo. For what is the body, the body found dead but a kind of material remainder, in Derrida’s terms’ a leftover’, the rest, the spirit departed. A body, ‘ a body was found’. is something abject, tinged with horror, requiring disposal, separation. ’
And as Carrie Miller wrote in her July 20, 2012 article in the online publication The Art Life;
A number of interesting local artists, including Marian Abboud, David Capra and Abdullah Syed, confront the inevitable in a variety of ways. David Capra’s video works, for example, involve the artist performing acts of Intercession on behalf of the departed, including speaking in tongues, banner waving, praying, and dancing badly, all in an outfit that includes tight white tights. These series of actions are performed both at a public pool alongside bathers and next to an Anzac statue in spiritual concert with the war hero. In typical Capra fashion, what sounds like bad camp or parody is in fact a sincere, entirely human, gesture of care that embodies the awkwardly comic nature of our existence and the simultaneous futile yet necessary drive to give it meaning, even after it’s all over.
The artists selected for this exhibition were Marian Abboud, Roohi S. Ahmed (Pakistan/Sydney), David Capra, Fiona Davies, Spring Hurlbut (Canada) and Abdullah M.J. Syed (Pakistan/Sydney).
Exhibition and Residency
Caravansai, Istanbul, Turkey
Persembe Pazari Projects,
Community
Sydney Art and About 2012 Festival Program City of Sydney Australia
Cells, Blood and Neurons Within You and Without You at Culture at Work, Pyrmont, Sydney Australia
The project was described in the catalogue as
This collaborative project features the work of artists Sherryl Ryan, Fiona Davies and Melody Lord. It showcases research output by the artists, created through collaborating with scientists working with breast cancer, blood and neurons. The exhibition includes projections linked to a smartphone app.
The theme of Art and About for 2012 was “ In Colour” an exploration of what colour brings to our life in the city. The Creative Director Gill Minervini wrote in the program guide that
Our projects and artists this year really aim to colour outside the lines, to take art of all mediums into new and unusual places. To let us think of the everyday in new ways and encourage us to colour our worlds differently.
The works on rice paper stuck to the corrugated surface of the mini orb lining sheets were the residue of the making of a series of videos on blood types. In these videos the letters and symbols of each blood type were painted in red ink onto a bed of wallpaper paste. over the next five or six minutes the bleeding out into the bed of paste was recorded in a video.
The videos of the blood types were shown projected onto the adjacent silk paper curtain during the night hours in a cycle of each blood type bleeding out forming branches of the means of distribution of a liquid in a liquid.