The Conversation

About

Inherited by the artist, the folder contains fragments of a lifetime – photographs, scraps of paper, postcards, a paper bag, an exhibition catalogue and other mementos. These clues have become the catalyst for over two years of research that has developed into this continuing body of work. 

Davey’s work accesses public and private collections to examine ideas of memory and place. By caching these objects we hope to form a sense of our selves, to create an impression of normality and staged familiarity that makes us feel complete. But on their own a collection of objects is an incomplete archive: in between are the gaps, the pauses. It is the silences that are the most revealing, where object and memory come together to form an imagined reality. 

The foolscap folder itself is the gap or silence within this inherited archive. The remembered becomes the lived present, reality shifts and the hunt begins; using museum archives and Internet searches, time collapses to make the forgotten visible. As it unravels, there is no map, no point B, just a series of fragments that when placed together form a reimagined whole, an archive of a life. Supported by Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.