2013
Museums And Galleries
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, ACT, Australia
Bad Girls ( 20 witness 1000) was curated by Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak . Included in the exhibition was my work Memorial/Australia, Picton-Vinnies, Tahmoor-Lifeline, Jul - Dec 1999 Coll Davies.
This exhibition celebrated the more than one thousand women artists who had exhibited at Canberra Contemporary Artspace since its opening as the Bitumen River Gallery in Manuka in the ruins of the former St Christopher school bus shelter. Now the CCAS is recognised as a leading contemporary art space in Australia.
The Curator in her catalogue essay wrote that ‘Bad Girls are everywhere …. Bad Girls are our heroines. In this exhibition we celebrate their journey in art and, through their journey, the changing face of feminist concerns over three decades.’
My work of three ironing board, shapes of domestic amour made of zinc gauze as used in meat safes, and buttoned with a harsh surface of discarded shirt buttons was selected for this exhibition of witnessing. The title of the work itself is a witness to those who undertook the work on collecting the buttons from the detritus of unwanted clothing in two opportunity shops Picton Vinnies and Tahmoor Lifeline in the time from July to December in 1999. The buttons were salvaged by my Mother, June Bonnie Davies. The title is Memorial/Australia, Picton-Vinnies, Tahmoor-Lifeline, Jul - Dec 1999 Coll Davies J.B.
The other nineteen artists who witnessed the one thousand were Alison Alder, Jane Barney, Vivienne Binns, Rachel Bowak, Jacqueline Bradley, Julie Bradley, Mariana del Castillo, Julia Church, Anna Eggert, Cherylynn Holmes, Catriona Holyoake, Stephanie Jones, Deborah Kelly, Mandy Martin, eX de Medici, Brenda Runnegar, Bronwen Sandland, Erica Secombe and Ruth Waller.
Artspace, Sydney, Australia
An survey exhibition of the work of Ian Milliss, Notes on the Works included my work As per Instructions I.
In his multi part exhibition Notes on the Works at Artspace in Sydney, the artist Ian Milliss included a series of instructional works which had been made and remade by others over the years of his practice. The Instructions to me for this work were relatively simple - I was to use strips of canvas, 200mm or so wide and what ever length I wanted, make them whatever colour I wanted and nail the strips to the wall in whatever way I wanted.
My work As per Instructions I, is a visualisation within the instruction I was given of the typical pattern formed by eight drops of blood falling from a height of one metre. in this visualisation the eight drops of blood have slid down the wall and onto the floor. The work as well has slid down the wall and onto the floor. The work has not followed the instructions and it was always very likely that it wouldn’t.
I didn’t realise until well after the opening that all of the other artists following instructions were members of an organisation called The Sydney Non Objective group or SNO. My work is a visualisation of a real world pattern, a visualisation of the behaviour of a real world material as it moves in a particular way.
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland, NSW, Australia
A group exhibition titled Dark Edges of the Collection included my 2008 video work Memorial/Time of Death
The curator, Cheryl Farell wrote of this work in the catalogue that ..
in the video work Memorial/Time of Death, flowers so often a witness of death, have been filmed over a period of time, slowly deteriorating. Projected onto a dark wall this work becomes emotionally potent as the edges of the iamges become ambiguous, conveying the concept that ‘the time of death” is fluid and there is often no one particular moment in which we can determine the moment of absence.s work
Other artists included in this exhibition include Davida Allen, James Gleeson, Mike Parr, Anne Ferran, Laith McGregor, Nell, Adrian Lockhardt, Jason Brooks, Chris O’Doherty, Louise Hearman, Andy Devine, and Francisco Goya.
Museums and Galleries and Curatorial
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland Australia
I curated the group exhibition Op Shop over all of the galleries of the Maitland Regional Art Gallery and included a number of my own works that reflected my practice of op shopping. The other artists selected for the exhibition component were Nicole Barakat, Cath Bowen, Fiona Davies, Sarah Goffman, Fiona Hall, Donna Marcus, Kiri Morcombe, Luke Roberts, Surabhi Saraf, Louise Saxton, David Sequeira, Maeve Woods, The Modified Toy Orchestra, Toydeath, Raqs Media Collective and Lex Rogers.
Op Shop also called The Opportunity Shop was a whole of gallery exhibition and suite of public programs to celebrate the fourth birthday of the reopened, extended Maitland Regional Gallery. The number and quality of op shops in the Maitland area is renown. Most of the artists selected for this exhibition use acquiring materials through op shops as part of their art practice. Others however provide a counterpoint to the economic system of capitalism and its reliance on consumption, arbitrary determination of value and production of excess waste.
For the gallery the exhibition was described by the Maitland Gallery Director Joe Eisenberg as ‘ providing ‘… a taste of the creativity, delight and commentary that can emerge from objects, items and all matter found, sold, available and enticing in op shops’ as well as providing another chapter in the art galleries’ Maitland Stories’:projects that invite engagement with different aspects of life in Maitland past and present.”
One of the public programmes organised for this exhibition was around the idea of having a passport that was stamped at each of the nine participating community Op Shops. The limited edition stamped images could be collected while the visitor engaged with a range of organisations from St Vinnies to The Salvation Army and on to the Red Cross. The following artists designed the images on which the stamps were based. - Anna Buxton Soldal, Michael Bell, Nell, Melissa So, Carlo Delos Santos, Clare Hodgins, Mitch Storck, Ahn Wells, Ben Mitchell and Martin Wilson.
Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, Australia
For the group exhibition UnBound, the co curators John Potts and Rhonda Davis selected my work Collaboration: starting with twenty three units of blood.
‘Like the travelogue of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (produced in 1963 by Ed Ruscha) this book uses a combination of old and new means of interaction to track a journey. The sobering question examined in text and image is what happens to a collaborative partnership when one party dies. Physical markers of the collaboration punctuate the journey in a similar manner to the photographs of service stations in Ruscha’s book, while the text allows a nuanced reflection to develop.’
An essay by Ann Finnegan explores the question of the impact of a death on a collaborative partnership. Click on the image to find the link to the next page with this text and more images of the book as book as paper and as Ipad.
Site Specific
Cementa 13
Cane, 2012 video was commissioned by Cementa as a site specific work in the Kandos Museum local history section.
The art blog, The Art Life partnered with Cementa 13 for this inaugural four day event in 2013. The Art Life described Cementa 13 as
‘… a biennial contemporary arts festival taking place in the post-industrial town of Kandos NSW. Over forty artists will exhibit video, installation, sound, 2d and 3d artworks in venues and locations across the town. Venues will include shop fronts, vacant lots, a disused school, scout hall, local pub, the local museum, golf-course, people’s homes, the surrounding bushlands, etc. The work will address the identity, history, and current social, environmental and economic context of the town’.
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 thier hand pal up and was hit with a cane a specified number of times depending on the required severity of punishment. The stories are of applied justice, accepted, rejected and/or still resented.
Over several weeks I stood outside Kandos Projects on the main street of Kandos asking the passers by if they had got the cuts at school and if they had if I could photograph their palm. Some told a more detailed story of that time on video.
Sophia Kouyoumdjian wrote in a review of Cementa 13 in issue 143 of Realtime that -
‘Another work boldly entered the emotionally charged realm of memorialisation within a community context. In her video work Cane (2012), Fiona Davies asked Kandos locals to reflect on school punishment. With the video frame tightly focused on each person's palm as they recounted punishment by cane in conversation with the artist, we see the hand open, not waiting for punishment but as a marker of memory. Placed beautifully in the Kandos Museum (an Instagrammers heaven), the work sits well amongst a bountiful archive of Kandos’ history. The responses from the participants to their canings range from ‘deserved’ to 'resented' and the work brings to light what is mostly amiss in such museological spaces—the personal voice informing the collection's significance.’
Caravansarai Collective, Istanbul, Turkey
In a parallel event to the Istanbul Biennale Persembe Pazari Projects, Final Cut was curated by Julie Upmeyer and Anne Weshinskey. The works Blood on Silk: Turn to/turn away and Blood on Silk; Trade were selected for this final exhibition of the works by the collective.
Other artists included in this exhibition were Pat Arnao, Anita Bacic, Richard Bartle, Suada Demirovic, Joan Edlis, Korhan Erel, Daisy Frossard, Arni Gudmundsson, Sibel Horada, Julie Upmeyer and Anne Weshinskey.
Commissions
Foyer of the Faculty of Science Building Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
The work Blood on Silk: Surgery is installed in the foyer of the Science Building at Macquarie University. It is surrounded by a number of artworks from the University Collection.
The reflective surface o the satin ribbon that was used to make eleven of the panels acts as a photonic device reacting to the incident light thrown onto the work from both the left and right hand sides.
Click on the image to the left for more details and for the sequence of images that show the slow reveal of the work as the viewer progresses from the entry door to the stairs, around the midway turn then up to the top landing and then around to the astronomy department close to the head height sight line of the viewer.