Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Wales Trinity Saint David (joint submission with Cardiff Metropolitan University and University of South Wales)
Bridges (2009-ongoing) [Installation of up to 60 framed, sanded postcards]. The Bridges series has been exhibited in a variety of configurations at the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, the WALL Gallery, London and the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 2009; in Davies’s solo exhibition for Wales in Venice at the 54th Venice Biennale of Art and Karsten Schubert Gallery, London, in 2011; Fold Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol in 2012 and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff in 2013.
The Bridges series was a collection of manipulated postcards that extended Davies’s work on the artistic potential of objets trouvés, in this case, postcards. The series explores the semantics of tourist artefacts and communication, and the discursive possibilities that might be brought to an object through manipulation. Although almost redundant in the digital age, the postcard is still an evocative object, signifying connection, separation, as well as associations attached to location and the value of photography. It is this fund of possibility that Davies seeks to awaken through manipulation. Postcards of bridges were chosen because of the different ways in which postcards and bridges signify connection and separation.
Whereas Davies’s other REF submissions see him arranging technologies to create disjunctions, here he shows how the manipulation of found objects can create inversions in meaning. All the postcards in the series have had the greater part of their surface meticulously sanded away by Davies, leaving only that part of the image that shows the bridge. The sanded area takes on an almost painterly quality, creating an inversion in value, from a throwaway representation to a canvas. With the bridges now depicted in the absence of their adjoining landscapes and without purpose, they shift identity from connectors to islands, self-standing objects signalling isolation.
The Bridges series has been exhibited in a variety of locations, including: Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea; WALL Gallery, London, both 2009; and in 2011 at Davies’s solo exhibition for Wales in Venice at the Venice Biennale, and Karsten Schubert Gallery, London. The work featured in Cooper, Artists' Postcards: A Compendium (Reaktion Books, 2012), the Czech journal Atelier Journal of Contemporary Art No. 18, 2011; and was illustrated in the Independent on Sunday 8.4.12. Three of the Bridges series were purchased by the British Council in 2011.
