Holly Davey

This body of work explores our relationship with archive both public and personal and how our lives can be interpreted through the fragments that are left. A seemingly random collection of objects: postcards, photographs, scrapes of paper, letters, diaries and other mementos are the remnants of our lives that can be found in public and private collections. They become the clues that indicate who we are…were...will be. These objects form a sense of ourselves; creating an impression of normality and staged familiarity that make us feel complete. However, it is in the gap, the pause, the silence that reveals the most. This is where object and memory can come together to form an imagined reality that we exist in. For this exhibition, a brown foolscap folder is the gap, the silence, the starting point. The remembered becomes the lived present, reality shifts and the hunt behinds; using museum archives and Google searches, time collapses making the forgotten visible. As it unravels, there is no map, no point B, just a series of fragments that when placed together form a re-imagined whole, an archive of a life.

​

This body of work was developed over a number of years and includes a range of techniques and materials from video, sculpture, drawings and collage.

​

To accompany this exhibition and ongoing body of work, I published a book and commissioned a text by Ellen Mara De Wachter. An edited PDF version of the book can be accessed here. 

​

The exhibition was supported by a production grant from The Arts Council of Wales and by in - kind support from Swansea College of Art. After this exhibition, I was supported with a Creative Wales Award from The Arts Council of Wales.