Kate Davis

In the two years since Kate Davis last featured on the Scottish Arts Council website, she has achieved an incredible amount. From awards and residencies to brand new exhibitions, publications and a talior-made show for the Tate, Davis's enthusiasm and talent cannot be denied.

The New Zealand-born artist, who completed her BA (hons) in Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, has recently exhibited new work at Tate Britain. She is the most recent to show work in Tate’s exciting Art Now series, which is programmed to reflect ‘current developments in contemporary British Art’. Art Now has included up to five exhibition each year since it began in May 1995 and has strived to ‘demonstrate the quality and variety of new art in the UK’.

Davis is in good company; other recent Art Now exhibitors include: Rory MacBeth, Joanne Tatham, Tom O'Sullivan and Sue Tompkins; Raqib Shaw; Duncan Campbell, Declan Clarke and Emily Wardill; and, Karin Ruggaber.

Your Body is a Battleground Still

Her Art Now show ran at Tate Britain in London from 3 – 25 March 2007 and is titled 'Your Body is a Battleground Still'. It is an interpretation of two works, 'Torso in Metal from the Rock Drill', 1913-14, by Jacob Epstein and Barbara Kruger’s 'Your Body is a Battleground', 1989.

Tate Britain describes Davis’s latest body of work:

‘Davis is drawn to the ambiguous space this powerful image occupies, a fractured vision of the future rooted in a specific moment from the past, looking both forwards and backwards, a humanised machine still open for interrogation.

'Your body is a battleground' is characteristic of Kruger’s 1980s graphic works which co-opted the language of advertising in order to provide a feminist critique of media representations of identity and sexuality. By adding the word ‘still’ to the title, Davis reactivates the phrase, extracting it from the past and perhaps implying an incomplete project. It is in the amorphous space between these two points of reference that Davis positions her project.

By distilling the languages of Epstein and Kruger, Davis revisits specific moments in art history and brings them into the present. Time is treated as an indistinct and elastic entity, a structure to be disrupted. In actively seeking out the fissures and cracks within familiar territories, Davis finds alternative spaces in which to operate. Perhaps in this ambiguous space that is neither present, past nor future, yet all three at once, new possibilities can be found.’

Forthcoming and Recent Exhibitions

Davis is currently represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, and will be showing with them at Art Basel, in Switzerland, in June this year. Davis’s recent solo exhibitions include a show at the Art Forum in Berlin (also with Sorcha Dallas), 'STOP! STOP! STOP!' at Kunsthalle Basel, and 'Could we? I am asking', at The Breeder, Athens.

Recent group exhibitions include 'If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution', at De Appel in Amsterdam, Group Show, at Anna Helwing Gallery in Los Angeles, at Liste Basel (with Sorcha Dallas), and, 'The Endless Summer' at Westlondonprojects in London. In 2005 Davis exhibited at Gasworks Gallery and at Frieze Art Fair, both in London, at Broadway 1602 in New York and at MiArt in Milan.

In 2006 Davis was awarded the Scottish Sculpture Workshop Residency and in 2005 was Artist in Residence at CCA in Glasgow.

Kate Davis and the Scottish Arts Council

Davis has had an involvement with the Scottish Arts Council for a number of years. She has received three Individual Artist Awards in the past and was also selected to represent Scotland at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2003. Towards the end of 2006 Davis was awarded a £15,000 major bursary through the Scottish Arts Council Individual Artist Creative and Professional Development fund. This award, funded by the National Lottery, allows Davis an opportunity to explore new ideas and realise other significant projects.