Flood Story (Gerry Davies)
featured work from ‘Flood Story’ collection
Artwork Description
Made with liquid graphite on Mylar, these hybrids of drawing and painting are images of speculative futures. Each depicts a scene of inundation, a drowned world in a time of climate change. The diver represents how we might return to visit our homes and their environments in a radically transformed future.
Artist Statement
This group of ‘Flood Story’ drawings are from a long series of works which propose possible futures, futures radically affected by climate crisis. As speculative fictions, the drawings imagine glacial and polar melt are complete, seas have risen, and disrupted weather pattens have scoured the land. Environments are inundated, fish swim over homes, towns sink into silt, and ground once dry is now the seabed. In each drawing a scuba diver returns, perhaps a future archaeologist or simply someone returning to their past.
Materially the work is made with graphite dust held in a suspension of damar varnish on Mylar -a technical drafting film- its silvery cast reminiscent of a daguerreotype, part luminous, part obscure. And with the light and dark of the drawing the result of space left untouched they have the feel of celluloid film in negative. Is this a photograph of a dream, or a single frame from a cinematic projection, from a film yet to be screened?
Gerry Davies
Born 1957, Pontypridd South Wales, UK. Studied BA: Fine Art at Wolverhampton University, specialising in sculpture and drawing. Studied MA: Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. After postgraduate study awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Perdue University, Indiana, U.S.A. Subsequently appointed for 12 months as Artist in Residence at Durham Cathedral, U.K. While at Lancaster spent a period of research as Artist in Residence at The Centre for Drawing, National Art School, Sydney, Australia. Most recently travelled to Taiwan as Visiting Artist at the National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei.
Last year a Flood Story drawing won First Prize at the 2023 Wales Biennale, UK. Recent group exhibitions include selected for The 2023 Scottish Landscape Awards, The Art Centre, Edinburgh, UK. Included in the 2024 Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, UK, and in May this year exhibited in STILL/WATERS/RUN/DEEP, Tidespace Gallery, Kirkcudbright, Scotland, UK.
A forthcoming solo exhibition will open on 4th October 2024 at the Ruskin Museum and House, Brantwood, Coniston, Cumbria. The title of the show is: Mr Ruskin, One Day Someone Will Scuba Dive Over Your House. The theme follows Ruskin’s early environmental concerns, particularly his 1884 lecture The Storm Clouds of the Nineteenth Century, in which he identifies ariel pollution affecting the skies and weather over London, Oxford and Coniston. The exhibition will comprise a new suite of drawing depicting Brantwood, its objects, collections, gardens submerged and adrift in a new Flood Story.