HAUS-A-REST
Art, Writing, Connections

Artists Kate Davis & David Moore

 

  our featured artists this month are sculptors -

Kate Davis & David Moore

 

Artists Kate Davis, Senior Tutor in Sculpture and Fellow at the Royal College of Art, and David Moore Programme Director for Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art began working together in 2010. The act of collaboration, whether it is with one another, a group of students with professionals in other disciplines, or within the local community increasingly informs the outcome of their work. Alongside distinguished individual careers, sculptors David Moore and Kate Davis formed ME-WE Productions in 2010 to mark their interest in collaborative working, whether with each other or designers, architects, other artists or fabricators.

Since then they have collaborated on a number of public commissions, projects and exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Spain, France, Austria, the Netherlands, and Japan, 


 

1 - Could you explain your practice?  Only you know why you do what you do.

Central to all our work is a sense of the physical body and events at the edge of consciousness that speak of those moments before and beyond language, and deal with primordial or transformed states of being.

We draw equally on philosophical concepts and emotional responses, to pay testament to human experience through a formalised, invented language.

The work explores mortality, matters of the heart, and notions of intimacy often playing on the relationship between measured and experienced time.

Most works are made in response to a specific location or to a particular event and draw on personal experience, despite our constant attempts to avoid this. Hence there is a personal narrative running along the work’s underbelly, which forms a shadow beneath a more open and speculative interpretation.  

2 - Is art relevant today? 

 Yes, art is relevant today. To be more accurate, it is the role of the artist in the way that they engage with communities, audiences, and other professions that is more relevant today, more than the production of art itself.

 Artists are important because they bring intuition and otherness into ways of thinking. Artists have the capacity to go into the unknown.  Like someone who is skilled in navigation and boatmanship, they don’t necessarily know the conditions they might meet but they have a skill set that makes them capable of negotiating whatever they encounter.

  In this way, there is every possibility that artists will discover new lands unlocked by the imagination. Imagination is the key to our survival.

 

3 – We are always asked what other artists influence us, we want to know what art you don’t like and which influences you?

Being involved in art education one develops an appreciation of such a broad spectrum of creative output that it almost becomes second nature to engage with everything we encounter. It would take a lot of head scratching to think of artworks that we could distinctively say we did not like.   

 However. we will take this opportunity to point towards some particular artworks that have stayed with us even though they may not be like the work we make ourselves or be the obvious first choices for contemporary artists and artists like us who work using such a variety of materials and strategies.

 ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’  1652 Bernini

 

‘Woman with her Throat Cut ‘ 1928 Giacometti

            

             Natura Morta 1956 Morandi

 

If someone submitted a portfolio to art school today and listed only these artists it would possibly set ‘alarm bells’ off but be assured that we spend a lot of our spare time looking at art by our contemporaries! It is impossible not to be influenced, good or bad, by everything you see. Everything you experience and really observe enters your visual index.

 

4- If you could go back 10-20 years what would you tell your younger self?

“Do not be afraid to make or keep on making mistakes. Mistakes are only a construct of the mind and no one is keeping count.”

“Once you find something you enjoy keep doing it.”

5 – If you could go forward 10-20 years what do you hope to have done or not done?

 We hope to have created more opportunities for ourselves to live and work in different communities and cultures for extended periods of time in order to keep enriching our lives through new experiences and working alongside other creative minds. 

TITLE: A Product of our own Making (Magritte Sky #1) 2022

Fire extinguishers, acrylic spray paint

56 x 46 x 36cm