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Drift (2011) [Single channel HD video installation 10’49”

Drift was a video work commissioned for the Venice Biennale in 2011. The piece is a further articulation of Davies’s interest in how video technologies might be arranged to create an embodied, rather than representational, depiction of an environment. The video shows a hand positioned just above the surface of water, and movement along a water course is indicated by passing reflections. Occasionally the fingers skim and play with the water to disrupt its reflective surface. The owner of the hand is in a boat travelling along the canals of Venice but this is not shown. The video has been composed to create a disjunction between what is given, what is concealed, and what appears distorted, where disjunction is a key device used by Davies in his other REF submissions on embodied, technological expression. With the medieval and renaissance splendour of the city kept off frame, and hinted at only through the distorted reflections on the water’s surface, the viewer is put in the position of having to confront differences between what the hand might signify – are the fingers playing on the surface of water innocent pleasure or sinister amusement? – and a picture where representational detail is constantly swelling in and out of view.

Davies was the sole representative for Wales at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

Drift was also exhibited at Davies’s In and Amongst solo show, Fold Gallery, London, and at the National Museum as part of Cardiff’s International Festival of Photography, 2013. The work is featured in the following publications: Curiger and Carmine (eds), Illuminations exhibition catalogue (Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2011), and Globus and Jones (eds), Tim Davies (Ridinghouse, 2011). Drift was purchased by the National Museum Wales in 2013.