Open Frequency
Each month Open Frequency will feature new and recent projects by both emergent and established artists based in Scotland. These artists are nominated by a national network of curatorial advisors - artists, curators, lecturers and critics.
Open Frequency is hosted by Axis and since its launch in 2003 has featured Scotland-based artists Katy Dove, Jim Lambie, and the Becks Futures prize-winners Toby Paterson and Rosalind Nashashibi.
Born in New Zealand in 1977, Kate Davis completed her BA Printmaking in 2000 and an MPhil in Art in Organisational Contexts in 2001 at Glasgow School of Art.
| While serving as a committee member of Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery she exhibited in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, London, Vienna, Basel, Dundee and Buffalo. In 2003, she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale and was selected for East International in Norwich. |
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Davis is interested in revisiting history – in specific points in time, in art and artists and the impact they have on her daily life. Her scrupulous pencil drawings overlap these images creating a weightless lyricism, imbued with a distinct personal style.
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Recent works utilise drawings and sculpture to create a three dimensional world complemented and completed by the addition of the viewer. In Country Grammar, a recent group show on the role of drawing in the work of contemporary Glasgow artists, Davis’ ‘Three Forms Study’ – a drawing of a plinth, a plinth itself and a drawing of an ancient sculpted head from the Burrell Collection – raised questions about the nature of drawing and the relationship between sculpture and viewer. |
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In her recent work Davis pushes images from the natural and manufactured world towards abstraction to make meticulously rendered drawings that play with the representation of beauty, symmetry and evolution. Using the pencil as a tool to question how our expectation of an image can alter sight, Davis attempts to offer an alternative pattern which is open to multiple readings. The drawings convey an anthropomorphic view of the objects which inhabit our immediate environment, animating the space we occupy. These surreal hybrids – a merging of both object and body part – suggest a mise-en-scene, tapping in to the potential state of objects and their imaginary narratives. |
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Extract from Participator by Anke Kempkes, published to accompany Participant at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 27 November 2004 - 22 January 2005. © Anke Kempkes
When I saw Kate Davis’ drawing Untitled (2003) for the first time, I was amazed by its daringly hybrid appearance. A fleshy neck grows out of a doubled plinth and stretches out in an almost Baconesque, phallic way. On its top there is a kind of a ‘head’. But the head’s ‘face’ has unidentifiable features. The mess of sketched structures in it looks like a wildly-grown plant. There are many of these strange creatures which Davis gives birth to in her body of work. They consist mainly of fragmented body parts: legs, arms, breasts. But their most disturbing aspect is their fusion with objects like pedestals, drapery or a table.
In these earlier works, particularly in the Applicant series, these fusions were composed by the contrasting and yet uniting operations of the synthetic collage. In the new paper works in this exhibition at Sorcha Dallas the body parts become objects and objects become bodies. The bizarre improbability of these unions is increasingly evoked by the aesthetic manoeuvre of ‘melting’ them together; reaching at a new coherence of the image prop. What we get is a new parade of dubious objects which, in the vision proposed by the artist, are to populate, to inhabit our daily life and our domestic spheres, maybe without us being able to notice yet. It seems that Davis would like to show us that there could exist a new animated world in our environments, beneath what we consider to be common and real. |
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Above image: Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity, 2003. Installation view.
Left image: Conversation with a manikin, 2004. Pencil and paint on wood |
2005
Two-person exhibition, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow
Solo exhibition, The Breeder, Athens
Group drawing exhibition, The Breeder, Athens
2004
Solo exhibition, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Rheinschau Projects, with Sorcha Dallas, Cologne
Flesh at War with Enigma, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Country Grammar, The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Spacemakers, Lothringer Dreizehn, Munich
Wider than the Sky, 117 Commercial St, London
Group exhibition, Centre de Creation, Brittany, France
Glasgow in Valligia, Museo Corta Alta, Fossombrone, Italy
Like beads on an abacus designed to calculate infinity, Rockwell Gallery, London
Web links
Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow
Review of Dirk Bell, Kate Davis, Alan Mitchell, The Changing Room, Stirling, 2003
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