Julia Davis, Consilience: as the world turns, 2013/14, Time-lapse HD video, stereo sound. 07:49 (loop). Concept/ Performance: Julia Davis, Camera: Alex Chemey, Composting: Matt Fezz,, Sound: Paul Huntingford, Julia Davis Thanks to NASA for extracts of sound from Voyager 1 & 11’s first recording of interstellar space and encounter with Saturn 1980.
Julia Davis
The primary focus of my research investigates the perceptions of and relationships between places, spaces and human habitation. My questions revolve around how these perceptions underpin our sense of self as well as how landscape is cultural space – a space formed by and informing culture.
Biography
Julia Davis is a site-specific artist based in Sydney, Australia. Over the past decade Davis’ work has been installed in salt lakes, deserts, coastal precincts, parklands, galleries and built environments. Her practice explores the perceptions and relationships between objects, places and spaces. More recently, Davis’ work has attended to the viewer’s experiential reading of space in terms of temporality and duration. She has exhibited in Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain, and is the recipient of numerous awards including the NAVA NSW artist grant (2011), the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award (2007), the Woollahra Sculpture Prize (2006) and the NGSW Director’s prize (2002). She currently teaches sculpture at TAFE and holds an MVA from Sydney College of Arts.
About The Work
Julia Davis’s work explores the effect of time on understandings of the body in relation to landscape and how this underpins our sense of self and place. She often works in ‘active‘ landscapes such as deserts, volcanic areas, coastal precincts and salt lakes and is interested in the idea that landscape is cultural space – a space informed by and informing culture.
In geological time, the landscape moves, pulses and crashes in processes of coming into and out of existence. The often violent imagery of turbulent volcanic ash clouds used in recent works translates here in this vast Southern Hemisphere sky, which elicits contradictory feelings of foreboding and rapture. Tension between anticipated loss and subsequent renewal, as well as the duality of processes that create and destroy, corrode and protect are ongoing interests in Davis’s art practice. The ‘active’ places she refers to mirror the fragile human experience of movement, instability, rhythm, reflection and change. In her work, geological time and human perception merge into a single spatial experience and take us closer to a sense of the world as our place.
You can also view Julia’s work produced during an IASKA’s residency in Western Australia, SPACED: art out of place, 2010Julia at SPACED: art out of place
