"Captured Loyalties". 2002.

"Divided Loyalties"

Detail of "Divided Loyalties" Left Hand side.

Detail of "Divided Loyalties" Right Hand side.

Detail of "Divided Loyalties" Lower Central section.

 This work is an exploration of my personal experience of diaspora. After becoming a Canadian citizen and living many years in Canada I returned to my homeland, New Zealand to live again. It was a fraught experience for me as most of my old friendships in New Zealand had faded over the 18 year interval, the country itself had undergone huge changes, and I was embedded back into my family structure after so long as a migrant. The people in my life in New Zealand had lived a vastly different 18 years than I had in Canada and so we had huge missing sections of experience. Values had shifted with those experiences. I had come home for family reasons - my loyalty lay there but my head and heart were essentially still in Canada where I had built a totally different life. I loved that life and the richnesses of it. In this work I try to express how my heart, mind and soul were stretched by this feeling of being divided about where I "really" wanted to be, the pressure of family obligations and loyalties and the pressure and stress this position put me under.

The tapestry is woven with an internal wire structure that was used to contour the woven surface. This weaving is attached to the "tethering" structures of two "places" with wire representing the strength of the bonds while at the same time wires of all different lengths spring free from the tethers. These speak to the loss of self I experienced as I hovered, suspended between the two existences. The painted stretched canvas background references the feeling I had that I belonged neither in New Zealand nor in Canada because of the choice I had made to return to a place that was no longer as I had remembered it, and in that process surrendering the place I had come from.


Materials: Acrylic on stretched canvas, copper wire, warp: cotton, weft: cotton embroidery floss, found wood.
Size: 50 cm x 40 cm.

Kimono 'Scape II'. Damask

This kimono is a damask weave, executed on the 70 harness Glimakra drawloom. The pattern blocks have then been handpainted. 

Life Form 2008

Life Form 2008.

This joyous celebration of life was formed by my abiding interest in working outside of straight lines, pushing the technical boundaries of shaping on the loom.

Merit Award winner for Creative Fibre

Warp - Cotton. Weft - Cotton Embroidery Flosses, Metallics

Damask scarves inspired by Beethoven sonatas.

Handwoven on the 70 harness draw loom. Two versions of one design - green and purple and the pink is another design. Pure silk, hand dyed. As displayed recently in the retrospective in Hawera.

"An Old Friend" (2013)

Gallery Statement From the joint Exhibition "Homeworks" 2014, Puke Ariki, New Plymouth:
The mechanisation of laundry tasks freed up many hours for the average housewife. Viv Davy's tapestry of an old wringer washing machine - rendered in incredible detail - might evoke nostalgia for the good old days. But her "old friend" also brings with it an air of menace. Looming large on a black background, the rusty metallic form appears almost alive, a sinister figure about to eat your fingers. The bone-crushing reality of the wringer washing machine reminds us that is pays to keep nostalgia in perspective.

This tapestry uses a wide range of fibers - wool, silk, cotton, acrylic, linen. The design is an enlargement of an old photographic image.  The scale has been inflated so the machine stands taller that myself, which is taller than the actual machine would have been. There is also a slight horizontal distortion to the image probably due to the restrictions of photography at the time the original photo was taken.

This piece is in the permanent collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth, New Zealand.



"An Old Friend" being woven. The image was "cartooned" horizontally, with the photographic enlargement placed behind the warp on the frame loom.

Weaving in Progress

"An Old Friend"