Solo Exhibition at Cottleston Gallery in Tauranga

The month of November has seen my work on show at the Cottleston Gallery in Tauranga. This exhibition is a mixture of tapestries and other fibre works. Most of the included pieces have been blogged on this blog site already but here is some of the support material that has accompanied the installation.
Firstly, the write up posted on The Big Idea, our art online newspaper.

'Daily Voices'. Viv Davy
Opening Night from 6pm Monday 7th November 2016
Come and meet Opunake artist Viv Davy, preview her intriguing textile art, and try Cottleston's world-famous cheese ball and punch.
Event type:
Art, Exhibition, Preview
Price:
Free - all welcome.
Venue:
Cottleston Gallery Tauranga.
Address:
128 Oropi Rd, Greerton, Tauranga. 0204783337
Region:
National, Bay of Plenty
Post date:
Thursday, November 3, 2016 - 12:26


Viv Davy - Intense Researcher
Cottleston Gallery is proud to present 'Daily Voices', 8 - 21 November 2016.
Viv Davy has woven, both literally and metaphorically, her (and, by extension, our), mundane tasks, everyday words and thoughts into tangible art objects.  In her studio using weaving, stitching and other fibre techniques Viv has been creating diaristic works that range from miniature tapestries to large installation pieces.
In recognition of her extraordinary art preparation, she has recently received the AUT University Dean's Award for Excellence in Research.
The materials she uses include silk, cotton, handmade papers, bandages, wax, and recycled fabrics, often dyed with natural sources like fennel and pohutakawa.
The results are intellectually and texturally complex, and reflect not only the diverse materials and methods but also her personal and historically-based narratives. The
viewer is drawn into the works to engage with the careful attention to detail that informs the pieces. Davy has been creating fibre art for over 40 years.  Based in Opunake, she has a Master of Art and Design and her most recent exhibition was as part of the 2016 Taranaki Arts Trail.  She also has work concurrently showing in the prestigious event
'World of Threads Festival' in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.
You are cordially invited to view Viv's textile art at her solo exhibition “Daily Voices”, Cottleston Gallery Tauranga (128 Oropi Road, Greerton). Opening preview is from 6pm Monday 7th November.

Written by
Cottleston Gallery Tauranga
3 Nov 2016
Cottleston is a boutique art gallery in Greerton, on the outskirts of Tauranga. Open during exhibitions 11 - 4.30 Tuesday - Sunday, and at other times by appointment.  Visitors are very welcome! Please sign up to our newsletter for information about exhibitions.


Here is the link to a local newspaper with two interview videos on the bottom of the article.
http://www.theweekendsun.co.nz/news/1528-intimate-messages-thread.html.

Over view of Solo Exhibition at Cottleston Gallery.

The curator at The Cottleston Gallery made a very comprehensive review of my solo exhibition in her gallery space which you can visit at: Tauranga exhibition


This installation has been very interesting to me as it was an opportunity to install in a space very different from the more conventional gallery white cube. Much of my making explores aspects of the everyday and the domestic mundane so this resonated well in the re-purposed villa space. The more intimate gallery context enabled the viewers to engage with the work in a very relaxed and secure space, which encouraged extended consideration of the pieces.

My behind the scenes paperwork was a bit of an underprepared shambles and I felt that this actually let the gallery down. So that lesson is one I also take away with me.

Many of the pieces in this exhibition are works I have wanted to exhibit more extensively so I am now re-evaluating the spaces that I approach to try and see if perhaps I can find a more "domestic" environment so the viewer experience can be enhanced.

The main drawback for me regarding this opportunity was the shortness of the hanging period. Because of the travel involved the time seemed extra short and I would probably negotiate for longer next time. However as the gallery curator said the numbers tend to drop off dramatically after the first fortnight.

All in all a great experience from which I learned a lot. 

Heart Strings September 2016

This work has been a long slow labour of love.

Derived from one of my drawings, it was woven on the octagonal frame loom which enabled me to create the "strings" by weaving supplemental wire based warps that ran at differing angles to the body of the tapestry.

Although I have experimented with wire for warps earlier in my practice this was a more extensive and complex exploration as the wire "strings" weave in and out of the body of the work becoming hidden and then revealed in differing ways. This created tension and sequencing issues that required careful resolution.

Detail.

Detail

Detail

"Heart Strings"

This work reflects on how multiple inputs and connections tug at our "hearts" asking for our support, attention, love. focus, commitment, nurturing.  These "tugs" range in their effects - they resonate differently emotionally within our souls or hearts. 

Installation of Liminal Sites: Materialising an Everyday. "The Codex Series"; "Her Room"; "Days"

My making practice for the last five years has been predominantly occupied with undertaking a Masters Degree programme that was practice based research. I did this as a part time student for two reasons: firstly, my domestic life is very full and rich with multiple ongoing demands that I value and consider worthy of spending time on and secondly, my making uses slow processes and my ideas take long consideration to properly devolve.  In the middle year I had a gap and attended just to domestic matters. This mission has been successfully achieved and I am now waiting to be capped 1st class honours which is a relief and a thrill.

This post is about my final examination installation, hung in September in 2015 at Percy Thomson Gallery in Stratford Taranaki.

The overall title of the exhibition was Liminal Sites: Materialising an Everyday. It was comprised of three installation elements.

The Abstract from my Exegesis follows:

            This visual art research practice examined the daily actions undertaken in a personal domestic everyday with a view to understanding its cultural significance. Across a period of 549 days intentional, mindful observation, and reflective record making were undertaken. Through the chronological accretion of minutiae and the trace of what is normally unseen or invisible, the patterns of time in the everyday were investigated and evaluated as value markers. The role of reinterpretive preservation or meaning maintenance to create, support and reflect individual identity and social position were examined and chronicled. To further explore the materialisation of this everyday as sites of understanding, differing durational practices using coding, diaristic recording, and textile-based media and processes were employed in the creation of symbolic representations. The domestic everyday was revealed as a site of active choice, liminal transferral processes and the flow of essences amongst the three different spheres, the personal, the domestic and the public.

The basic principle that underpinned the approach to the entire research project was explained by Mikhail Bakhtin as follows:

"The world in which an act or deed actually proceeds... is a unique world that is experienced concretely: it is a world that is seen, heard, touched, and thought, a world permeated in its entirety with the emotional-volitional tones of the affirmed validity of values. The unitary uniqueness of this world [is] guaranteed for actuality by the acknowledgment of my unique participation in that world, by my non-alibi in it. [I] come upon this world, inasmuch as I come forth or issue from within myself in my performed act or deed of seeing, of thinking, of practical doing." [1]     

Informed by this central concept my research was based in my own domestic everyday life. It was founded in a detailed practice of "seeing" what my everyday actually was, rather than assuming what it was. I undertook diaristic recording and observational practices.

This research practice took the reiterative and repetitive time that structures much of the quotidian and used it as both a subject and a practice material. Ritualised processes that resulted in longitudinal accretions, evidencing time’s passage, recorded the content of the cyclical dispensations of value as time. The durational recording actions synthesised time into a spatial presence - an act of liminal transfer.To undertake an extended rule-based practice that was focused on contemplative recording of the practice of my existence engaged the very obdurate nature of temporality to generate the materialisation. The cycle of the day always occurred and triggered the rules of the cycle of the recording.  This recording produced a timescape which Holland describes as "a temporal vista that brings into focus a micro-temporal view of the world, and can in this way  . . . give insight into the dynamic unfolding of real lives. Temporality, its different meanings and the way the different temporalities intersect and play out,"[2] is the essence of the everyday. Through the durational practice evidence was accrued of the variability of the timescape. No two records are the same - the domestic everyday is a continuously shifting and morphing phenomenon. As Lefebvre states: "life is trapped in an intermediary zone between cyclic and rationalized linear time."[3] There are differing timescapes that intersect with each other and that are woven through the different realms of the domestic everyday.

The first of these practices created the "Daily Log" which was a pragmatic listing of everything I undertook or was engaged with that supported my domestic existence as based in my home. From this, detailed analysis was undertaken into what my time was spent on. I considered that where I spent time was at sites of value to myself and those in my domestic context. Those tasks or engagements that held no deep value for me did not get time spent on them. Two other diaristic recording and reflective practices were developed from the "Daily Log". 

The first of these diaristic works derived from "The Daily Log" was called "The Codex Series" which is pictured below. Every day for a calendar year I used the masthead of the local Taranaki newspaper as a base to build a symbolic, emotively reflective collage record of my daily mundane activities. Each undertaking was assigned a material and these were applier using hot wax to either the front of the page - for the morning, or the reverse face for the afternoon. The materials were selected from my studio supplies that were on hand that were sedimented with emotional significance for me. Their formats could be infinitely varied to reflect my response to the engagements on that particular occasion. This was a material code. 

Overview of "The Codex Series" Installation with the material code "translation" banner running above the diaries.

Close-up view of "The Codex Series" and some of the material code banner. 

Each element of "The Codex Series" was distinctive, covers

Detail of "The Codex Series"

The second diaristic practice that was generated from "The Daily Log" was called "Her Room".

Overviews of "Her Room", a 365 day diary. This diary is recorded on two faces of the fabric, one face is a stream of consciousness record about the pragmatic parts of my mundane everyday.  The opposing face is about my inner world - my private world of creativity. The pragmatic side is recorded in ball point pen  it was installed to face into the "room", the inner world is recorded in HB pencil - it is more fugitive.  The fabric created a liminal site where the thoughts informing my reality in my everyday domestic situation were materialised. These records run continuously across the drops of fabric and down the length of the drops. 

Please see the second blog post about "Her Room" if you are interested in my reflective and evaluative observations recorded while creating this work. It is called Reflections and Observations on "Her Room" - The Creating Process. https://silktangles.blogspot.co.nz/2017/11/reflections-and-observations-on-her.html

The third element of the installation was referred to as "Days". I have subsequently renamed this piece "Days - A Liminal Site". There is a separate blogpost about this work.

Overview of "Days - A Liminal Site"

Detail of "Days - A Liminal Site"

The permanent link to my Exegesis in Scholarly Commons is http://hdl.handle.net/10292/9755.

[1] Michael E Gardiner, "Bakhtin's Prosaic Imagination," in Critiques of Everyday Life (Taylor & Francis Books, 2000). 52. Quoting Bakhtin 1993: 56-7.

[2] Janet Holland, "Timescapes: Living a Qualitative Longitudinal Study," Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research[Online] 12, no. 3 (2011). 

[3] Lefebvre. 84.

Return II 2016

Detail of "Return II"

"Return II"

My love affair with paper and eco-dying continues with this work furthering the exploration of my connection to my geographical environment as it supplies my physical reality with the essentials for life. The physical world is created in layers, strata, deposits  and in this work I have been overlaying transparent papers with plant pigment deposits on in a technique like painterly wash layers. This way the pigments have built up in different densities and textures across the underlying surface of the work. Superimposed and imbedded into these layers are the skeletal leaves. I have collected, cleaned, dried and pressed these remnants of life's passage from my surrounding physical environment.  They feed the layers below as in the past the layers below fed their growth form. The cycle of life continues with their return. 

"Time Adds Pigment to Memories" 2014

This series consists of three units each of which is multi-panelled. Together or apart they are reflections on the passage of time as it is recorded in memory.

"Time Adds Pigment to Memories I"

Detail of "Time Adds Pigment to Memories I"

Each of the "pages" that make up the panels in this series was created with a base layer, pigmented, waxed and carefully formed. Accretions of "particles" were added to this layer, some hot waxed, some stitched. Every "particle" had emotional burden or was sedimented with meaning for me. The non-pigment colours were chosen to resonate with memories of my Mother, these shades of green being her favourite. As the "particles" were added or loaded onto he base memories they assumed new relationships with each other than they have in their own stand- alone existence. This aligned with my understanding of how my knowledge of things in the past shifts and keeps shifting, the textures changing depending on my current point of view or perspective. 

Detail of "Time Adds Pigment to Memories I"

"Time Adds Pigment to Memories II"

"Time Adds Pigment to Memories III"

Complete Series of "Time Adds Pigment to Memories I, II, and III". 2014.

These works explore how creation happens in our memory. Fragments, scraps of recall either disjointed or integrated, create a precious entity in that process of memory, which becomes our reality.  The colouring of these fragments shifts with time, as their meanings move. These become the layers of our existence, shielding our essence while filtering how we read others.

The title for this series is taken from the novel by Mia Yua.'Translations of Beauty'.

Mixed media, including, tissue and hand cast paper, silk fabrics, calico, wax, beads, laces; natural pigments. Framed and glazed with Museum glass to ensure no UV degradation. 

Sizes: I - 71 cm x 57 cm. 
          II - 107 cm x 57 cm.
          III - 78 cm x 57 cm.