Gathering Shadows

Suzanne Davey, Gathering Shadows, ceramic, brick, bones, wood, charcoal, shells, 70cm x 300cm x300cm

Gathering Shadows is a site responsive installation that responds to the changing cultural history of the Coal Loader, Waverton, from its indigenous heritage, land use on the site, its role in facilitating the coal mining industry through to its current role as a centre for sustainability on the harbour foreshore.    The work considers our inter-dependence with site histories (indigenous, animal, geological) and the potential future consequences of our collective actions and inaction towards environmental ecologies.    Notions of temporal flows, site ruptures and dis-ruptures, surface wounds and healing are investigated.    The work explores clay as a media shaped by human touch and the ceramic traditions of containment. Unable to hold back their contents shells, small animal bones, charcoal and bricks flow and spill in the shadows of the ceramic forms.   

Suzanne Davey, Gathering Shadows, detail, ceramic, brick, bones, wood, charcoal, shells, 70cm x 300cm x300cm
Suzanne Davey, Gathering Shadows, detail, stoneware ceramic, 45 x 40 x 40 cm

Collecting Mountains

ceramic art installation
Suzanne Davey, Collecting Mountains, ceramics, mixed media, sound, 220cn x 200cm x 150cm

Collecting Mountains is a multidisciplinary installation created for EARTH: Four Elements exhibition at The Creative Space. The project included sound, photography, ceramics, plants, books relating to mountains, topographical maps of mountainous areas, domestic furniture, bricks and volcanic rocks. The sound element was a soothing Mountain Meditation repeated continuously. It was created by Wendy Wood, University of Derby, presented as part of a nursing workshop on compassion focussed therapy.  

Collecting Mountains reflects upon our complex and contradictory interrelationship with geology and our passive observations of the altered ecologies of the earths surface as we go about our day to day lives.   The work investigates mountains as a cultural construct upon which we project our desires for conquest, escape from the everyday, for spiritual fulfilment, our thirst for exploration and aspirational dreams. They fulfil key physical and psychological human needs yet we transform them irrevocably via land acquisition, large scale landscaping, mining and architectural interventions.  

The installation explores clay as an earth resource transformed by human action and draws upon ceramic decorative traditions of display in a domestic context, as passive background to our everyday experiences.  

Collecting Mountains asks how we might re-imagine our future relationship with the earths surface and considers how we may evolve into a sustaining species through reflection and thoughtful action.

Suzanne Davey, Book Mountain, detail, (without mountain books), ceramics, books
Suzanne Davey, Upside Down Mountain Pot, detail, ceramics, metal, plant
Suzanne Davey, Slices of Mountains, ceramic
Suzanne Davey, Shadowlands (series), stoneware ceramic
Suzanne Davey, Collecting Mountains detail, Hold, stoneware ceramic, 35 x 25 x 22 cm

All That Remains: SALTWATER

Suzanne Davey, All that Remains, ceramic, salt, 50cm x 250cm x 100cm

All That Remains featured in SALTWATER, a group exhibition at Manly Art Gallery curated by Katherine Roberts. The ceramic sculpture and salt installation responds to the ocean as a dystopic landscape. It explores the sea as a place where contemporary human dramas are played out as people seek sanctuary and safe harbour, and as a site of irreversible ecological and geographical loss in a climate changed future. The work is a fragile memorial relic that references our complex cultural, psychological and corporeal connections to the ocean through motifs of human and marine anatomy as well as maritime architecture. Despite human loss and environmental destruction ‘what remains’ is the chance to seek new responses and political solutions to human struggles.

Suzanne Davey, All That Remains, ceramic, salt, 50cm x 250cm x 100cm

Sweet Surrender


Suzanne Davey, Sweet Surrender, ceramic, metal, 220 cm x 220cm x 30cm



A protective response to the fragility of the delicate ecosystem of Stony Range; captured, completely surrounded and held to ransom by the encroaching urban environment.

 A site specific work installed in Stony Range Regional Botanical Garden 2014.



Overhead installation view, Sweet Surrender, ceramic, metal, 220 cm x 220cm x 30cm

Installation detail, Sweet Surrender, ceramic, metal, 220 cm x 220cm x 30cm

Ceramic detail, Sweet Surrender, ceramic, metal

Installation view, Sweet Surrender, ceramic, metal, 220 cm x 220cm x 30cm