'THE SLOW TIDE' WAS EXHIBITED AT ARCH STUDIO GALLERY, LISMORE NSW,  FROM OCTOBER 2ND - OCTOBER 24TH, 2021

 

Beki Davies is a Northern Rivers based contemporary landscape painter, printmaker and ceramicist, with a multi-disciplinary practice that excavates the experience of being in landscape to connect with the phenomenology of place. 

Her work is a meditation on the dynamic process of  change, exploring our relationships with the natural world, aiming to create a visual mythology of a place and a time between existing landscapes and disappearing spaces. Her work seeks to challenge the premise that landscape is not an entirely ocular experience, rather more of a symbiotic ontology, that is; when we experience a place; the place is also experiencing us.  

Davies becomes a collaborator with the landscape, imbuing her pieces with the presence of place by integrating the elements from the site into her work. The drawings, prints and cyanotypes in The Slow Tide are made using light, wind, and rain from the site to recreate a direct experience of being in the landscape.  

The Slow Tide is a body of work that draws on the artist’s experience of growing up in and around the estuarine landscape of Tallebudgera Creek. It focuses on the coastal mangrove forest that skirts the waterways around the Jellurgal headland; a site of significance to the Kombumerri people of the Southern Gold Coast. 

Davies’ work ponders the idea that it is not any one thing that creates a feeling of place, but rather a repetition of patterns and plants, or certain movements and shapes that echo over and over again to form a metaphorical fingerprint of a site.  

The mangroves have this repetitious movement, their bodies thrashing and clawing out of the mud, a mud so dark it's almost blue. Fighting up towards the canopy in a whirling, rhythmic, jittering dance. The place is very much alive, the breathing forest. The mangrove’s pneumatophores marking the wet forest floor, like a tally counting the turning tides. This is a place of both decay and life, dynamic and constantly shifting.