Holly Davey
The Interview Room
The Old Police Station, Deptford, London, 2015
A month long residency in a shared studio with six female creative professionals. It was an opportunity to make develop a new body of work as well as network within a new artistic community. Will Tell You More When I Return is from a series of photographic tracings that are part of a body of work called The Conversation, Part Two. Created during a residency at The Interview Room, The Old Police Station, Deptford, London, in 2015, these tracings document the landscapes that were seen on a road trip from Los Angeles to Sacramento in 1972. By removing the photographic image from the page and leaving only a line drawing, these landscapes loose their meaning, emotional connection and memory. The landscapes become about structure, shape, form - a series of lone objects in a white void that enabled the viewer to superimpose their own meaning, emotion and memory to them. By simple laying tracing paper over the archival photographic image I am able to reduce its content to a line drawing, its basic information. Yet this is still enough to communicate ideas around place, memory and belonging.
Will Tell You More When I Return
Stepping into your frame, shadowy shapes loom out of the dark. I try to hold on but
my fingers can’t find a place to rest, brushing the edges of existence.
Soft
Smooth
Surface
A brown folder with ten Polaroid’s and some remnants of a trip my grandfather took
in 1972, has begun a period of research to unravel his journey through the scraps of
information that he left behind. It has generated ideas around collection, archive and
how these form an understanding of our identity.
How do objects tell us the truth about our existence? This present moment will
soon become our collective past. So how will you remember it? Does it shape the
remembered version of who you were?
We were?
Are?
An excerpt from ‘Will Tell You More When I Return’ as part of a month’s residency at The Interview Room, Deptford, June 2015.
The residency was supported by Arts Council Wales.
