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Kate Davis, ‘Prop’, bronze and gold leaf, edition of 3, 153x14cm, 2008.
Courtesy: the artist and Fred London.
Fred, London
14 March – 4 May
Reviewed by: Heather Phillipson
The cumulation of her artist residency at the Wordsworth Trust in Cumbria, Kate Davis’s recent work performs, both implicitly and explicitly, Romantic notions of the reconciliation of the human and nature through art. Like Wordsworth, Davis explores a kind of love affair with nature in particular, and with one’s experience of the world in general.
According to Wordsworth, significant poetic expression requires an intuitive response, mediated by reason. In Davis’s responses to place through the physical act of making – a kind of act of ‘love’ – she manages to render any Cartesian dualism between mind and body, reason and intuition, unsustainable. All are aspects of engagement. As demonstrated by her portraits of the god and goddess of love, Eros and Aphrodite Kallipygos – a photograph that depicts an archer aiming his arrow not at a person but towards the mouth of a cave, and a pinhole drawing in which the artist has obsessively punctured a large sheet of paper to produce a two-dimensional, pointillist replica of a historic sculpture, respectively – ‘love’ is both rational and irrational, delicate and violent, ephemeral and absolutely of the body.
Likewise, in What – a drawing that resembles human anatomy but remains unidentifiable, produced by scoring steel such that the hot filings flick back onto, and adhere to, a sheet of glass – the violent and unpredictable nature of the process contrasts with the delicacy and apparent control of the resultant etching. Here, ‘love’ is played out as an overwhelming act of responding, being, making.
Wordsworth’s desire to use language that gives a voice to lived experience is reflected in Davis’s ambiguous lull as both exhibition title and an inscription on a mirror. It is a moment of suspension – a tension between past, present and future. ‘Lull’ simultaneously suggests an act of pacification, a pause in activity, and a moment of calm before a surprising event (a false sense of security). These are precisely the experiences of the processes of both ‘love’ and art as they are depicted here – a confrontation with the wilderness: unexpected, transitory, and unpredictable.
Also echoing sublime and Romantic notions, Boat, a mirrored, stainless steel bathtub-like vessel stranded on the gallery floor, and big enough only for a single, recumbent female, recalls Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Cursed, isolated in a tower, and unable to view the world other than in a mirror, the Lady see Lancelot’s passing reflection, falls in love, sails to Camelot to find him, and dies in the process. Like an artist, she is caught between isolated reflection, and living, loving, and dying in the world.
Davis’s art successfully holds in balance reflection and sensual engagement. Re-contextualised in a London gallery, these subtle works emphasise the importance and specificity of place and experience, and of responding accordingly. Prop, a branch recast in bronze, and installed during the residency as a means to keep the window open in the Boathouse, seems to epitomise the balance between internal and external, and the playful and the reflective that lull elegantly achieves.
Writer detail:
Heather Phillipson is an artist and writer based in London.
Venue detail:
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