OF THIS PLACE

Of This Place is an examination of home, of one’s self and one’s place in the environment. After all, what is home? Is it a building? Land? A loved one? Our physical body? Or, is it the layers which make up each of us? Is home the whole made from all those parts?

Each work in Of This Place, though different, is itself layered. Some use stones found on Haumoana Beach where Davies lives, paired with flexible fabric sculptures which draw on her background in costuming. Others are simply layers, in and of themselves - fabric coated in resin, carved, with pigment rubbed in. Others are vessels, made using a clay form, the residue of which can still be seen and felt.

A large collection of these vessels cover the floor. Evoking our bodily homes, their emptiness reminds me of the inevitable natural end of all our bodily vessels and of Davies’ other work, as an embalmer. Their organic forms and fleshy colour, the resin-coated fabric painted with ochre, give each its own unique appearance. Davies sees embalming as the final act of love for our bodily vessels, preserving them for just long enough for loved ones to say goodbye. Just as each of our bodily vessels are unique, worthy of love and respect, the same could be said of these. Just as these empty vessels hold space, embalming allows the bodily vessel to hold space for grief. These small vessels, the perfect size to fit into my palm and clustered en masse, also remind me of the important daily balancing act of both taking up space and holding space for others.

Six “reluctant icons”, as Davies calls them, are hung at eye level on one wall. These vessels of adoration are arrangements, each with its own equilibrium, which encourage the viewer to interact, to pick up the empty vessels then replace them on their bed of collected stones. Set on small, home-made table cloths, there’s an air of domesticity, calling to mind the small, daily acts of ritual, meditation and worship which we each perform.

These works ask - what are your shrines? What are your domestic votives, worthy of adoration?

They also reveal a layer of Davies’ being, of her ancestral home - her forebears were Anglican missionaries. But, as organised religion wanes in this country, these works make me contemplate - what shrines do we, as a society, collectively have now? Accumulation of wealth, followers, influence, land? We each hold such powerful magic within ourselves, we should carefully consider where we direct that energy, where we focus our rituals.

The works on the back wall draw you further into the gallery and into Davies’ sense of home - to an examination of land and physical place, the ground beneath one’s feet. It is here that the deeper layers of Davies’ being begin to show. As a pākehā woman, descended from generations of missionaries and farmers who first arrived in New Zealand around the time of colonisation, these layers of Davies’ whakapapa show themselves most in her landscape works. We are all the products of the systems we are raised in, the tendrils of those systems finding their way into the layers of our very being, whether we welcome them or not. Not to mention, our deepest-held layers show themselves most often in moments of vulnerability, and what is more vulnerable than the act of creative practice? Here, as Davies considers how the place where she lives feels, she re-enacts the actions of her ancestors - fragmenting the land into smaller portions, abstracting it, deciding which bits are home. The layers of history held in the whenua here are intricately linked to the artist’s own layers of history.

As a first generation, pākehā New Zealander, I have often wondered - as much as this land beneath my feet is home, can I ever really be “of this place”, when I am actually of another place, far from here? Generations of my whānau travelled great distances, across many lands, in search of a better life; my whakapapa is rooted in the foreign lands of England and Scotland. I live here as a guest of tangata whenua, welcomed here to make this place my home, to enjoy the abundance that is found here. All I am asked in return is to be a good Tiriti partner. Perhaps that is the key to belonging here. But, in order to deliver on the promises held within Te Tiriti o Waitangi, I must examine the actions of my ancestors and work hard to not repeat them.

Whenever I consider my place in Aotearoa, I am reminded of Elliot Collins, another pākehā artist whose text-based work considers our relationship to this land, to its history and its future, as partners in Te Tiriti. One work in particular, a large-scale mural shown at Tauranga Art Gallery in 2016, has become a touchstone for me in these conversations. It said: The weight of history is not yours to bear.

Is that what Davies achieves with these works? Subconsciously examining the acts of her ancestors, considering the weight of their actions and how they affect how she relates to the land where she now lives, while also allowing the work to carry the weight of those actions, rather than she, herself, bearing that weight. Even if that is not her intent, these abstract landscapes offer us all an opportunity to examine the actions in our collective history and how we, as a direct result of colonisation, treat this land we call home - slicing it up and purchasing it to claim as our own.

But these works, while deeply introspective, also draw out, instinctively invoking te hāro o te kāhu, from the centuries old Ngāti Kahungunu whakataukī, the view of the soaring hawk above this particular whenua and its people.

Te hāro o te kāhu focuses our attention on the future of the whenua and its resources. It asks us to work towards a collective future, where we see the whenua not as individual portions but as ūkaipō, a source of sustenance to us all, with all parts in harmony.

Of This Place is an examination of oneself, one’s environment. How we relate to the parts around us and how they relate to us. But it also asks us to examine the layers of our own being, through examination of its layers. Each of these objects brings its own story to its existence, in the same way that each viewer will bring their own story to this work. This body of work is the beginning of a journey for Davies, an exploration into what it means to be in this place, and of this place. It’s a journey which echoes where we are at as a nation, examining what it means for each of us to be in this place and of this place and what that means for our collective future. Ka haere tōnu tātou.