Garden of Cruel Delights

June 17, 2019November 18, 2019 | Suzanne

site responsive installation Coal Loader Waverton — Suzanne Davey, Garden of Cruel Delights, plants, wood, metal, bricks, stone, jute, copper, 250cm x 250cm x 800cm

A site responsive installation exhibited at the historic Coal Loader, Waverton, as part of the North Sydney Art Prize, curated by Alison Clark. The work was located on the Coal Loader Platform, surrounded by community garden beds. It extends and builds upon The Garden of Cruel Delights photographic series exploring our inter-relationships with plants.

site responsive art installation Coal Loader Waverton — Suzanne Davey, Garden of Cruel Delights, plants, wood, metal, bricks, stone, jute, copper, 250cm x 250cm x 800cm

Statement:

The Coal Loader is an exchange zone between us, plants and environmental forces, where flora experience constant transformation through our destructive and constructive actions. Tactile and material interventions performed on living plants are utilised to examine concepts such as empathy, control, adaptation to showcase the power of plants to lead us to better futures.

site responsive art installation — Suzanne Davey, *Garden Of Cruel Delights*, installation detail

Reaching for the Moon

July 30, 2017November 18, 2019 | Suzanne

Gazing through a domestic lens our understanding of the world beyond is both revealed and concealed through ebbs and flows of knowledge. Reaching for the Moon reflects upon the complexities of our interrelationships with spaces and how cultural and social perspectives transform our experience of place.

Vintage curtains and their metaphorical associations with the discarded, the everyday, the body and gender are utilised to investigate the phenomena of viewpoint. Constructive and destructive making traditions examine tensions between the visible and the felt, interior and exterior space, social realities and romantic ideals that influence our perception and knowledge of our worlds.

The moon is often cast as a cultural mirror upon which we project notions of hope, aspirational dreams, escape, utopia, spirituality, quests for discovery or a desire for universal conquest. It’s a talisman that connects us all but we also experience it differently, depending on our cultural and social veiwpoint. Gazing upwards at the sky our concept of the moon never wanders too far from the worlds we know best.

Rise and Fall

April 30, 2017November 18, 2019 | Suzanne

Rise and Fall is a textile work created in response to recent political storms and to the rise of the right internationally. It wafts and wanes in the slightest breeze. Exhibited in Four Elements: Water, Creative Space.

Statement:

Tides rise and fall, waves rise and fall, storms rise up….. and fall away.

Water rises and falls with its own agency and we rise and fall in its wake.

The rhythms of ocean systems mirror social and political storms we face now; the rise of the right and political aggression and the resultant flows of people in the wake of these surges.

Webs of crossings and traversing, flows and networks of social relations, our fragility in the face of storms and the constancy of change are investigated through textiles. Utilising the language of sails and flags time and human action is made visible as the surface is ripped, pierced, punctured, repaired and stained and new connections are made.

Together with water we rise and fall, face change and unknown futures.

All That Remains: SALTWATER

November 20, 2015November 18, 2019 | Suzanne

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

contemporary art

contemporary art

Garden of Cruel Delights

Reaching for the Moon

Rise and Fall

All That Remains: SALTWATER