Chance to get a slice of Kiwi life

New Zealand-born artist Kate Davis shows the copper plate she used to create the etching On Sensitive Ground (left). PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON
New Zealand-born artist Kate Davis shows the copper plate she used to create the etching On Sensitive Ground (left). PHOTO: GREGOR RICHARDSON

While most Kiwi artists yearn to exhibit internationally, Kate Davis wanted to exhibit in New Zealand. Rebecca Fox learns why the Kiwi-born Glasgow-based artist came to Dunedin.

With her intricate drawings, etchings and installations going up in Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Kate Davis is excited.

For the Lower Hutt-born Glasgow-based artist, it is the first time her work has been exhibited on home soil.

‘‘It's been really great to be able to come to New Zealand and have this time here.''

The gallery brought Ms Davis out as part of its International Visiting Artist Programme after her work was discovered by a previous gallery curator while working in Scotland.

She brought her husband, art historian Dr Dominic Paterson, and the couple's 14-month-old-son.

‘‘It's been lovely for him to have a taste of Kiwi life and it's been a miserable winter in Glasgow and we've been having a summer here so as superficial as that is it makes a big difference.''

For the past three months she has been working out of a studio in Otago Polytechnic's printmaking department creating a new series of works.

‘‘I studied printmaking in my undergraduate degree, but I hadn't done any etching for a long time. Appropriately I was quite rusty.''

With support from polytechnic staff, she was able to get quickly into her work, which involved printing etchings from copper plates.

Everyday objects used in the home and print studio were the basis for the shapes of the copper - a dinner plate, a baby's cot mattress, a blanket, a sink.

‘‘Plates, baths and beds - they call the press the bed.''

The copper was then used as it would be in life - the sink filled and used to wash a blanket, dinner eaten off the plate, a baby playing on the mattress, and the markings left by those activities captured and transferred to paper.

‘‘I put the blanket on my knees and rested my head on it. I didn't have any idea what the marks would look like. I wanted the honest replication of those marks.''

Inspiration for the work came from her last project, the film Weight (2014), commissioned by LUX/Artists Moving Image and BBC Scotland.

Weight juxtaposed script from a 1961 documentary about artist Barbara Hepworth with the rare images she found showing women's domestic activity that she found in the BBC archive.

The aim was to describe activities that did not have a monetary value attributed to them.

She was inspired by the New Zealand feminist economist Marilyn Waring, who questioned where values were placed on activities such as breastfeeding.

‘‘I'm interested in how that related to art making where we are often drawing attention to things to place value on them.''

Her Dunedin exhibition would also feature Weight (2014), and other pieces of her work including some of her intricate pencil drawings and installations, from the past 10 or so years, some of which has been loaned from other organisations.

While she was a multimedia artist, drawing was something she always returned to.

‘‘I think one of the reasons I really enjoy processes like drawing is there is direct connection between your hand and what you are making.

‘‘I have often felt my strongest work came from when I can retain an intense relationship to the work as it develops.''

She has also incorporated a group of works by other artists, drawn from the collection of the gallery and beyond. These ‘‘guest'' artists range from Rembrandt to the fellow expat contemporary artist Fiona Connor, each chosen for ‘‘meaningful connections'' to the concerns of her own works.

‘‘It's been really good for me to get a bit more of a sense of other artists, that has some kind of connection to what I'm thinking about and work that I can learn from.''

Ms Davis, who moved to the United Kingdom when she was 13 with her Kiwi mum and Yorkshire dad, has been carving a career for herself since graduating from Glasgow School of Art and being selected as one of five artists to curate at Transmission Gallery in the city.

‘‘At the end of that you come out thinking I really want to be a curator or really desperate to do your own work. I came out feeling like that.''

Gallery curator Lucy Hammond said it would be an unusual exhibition for a residency as it involved not only the current project but other works brought out from Glasgow and Germany as well as New Zealand works.

‘‘It is an excellent opportunity to introduce Kate's practice into New Zealand in a much broader way as well as the outcome of the residency.''

There was a big compulsion for New Zealanders to take their practice out to other countries, Germany in particular, so it had been interesting to do it in reverse, she said.

• To see: Kate Davis, The Unswept Floor, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Saturday until June 6.  Artist talk, Sunday at 3pm.
 

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