May

(2025)

HD video with stereo audio, 07:35

‘May’ was commissioned by Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, as a part of a solo exhibition titled ‘The glass with the fingers dipped in’, 2025:

“In the Warehouse, a large-scale moving image projection, six suspended paintings, and a live vocal performance will be presented alongside Davies’ new artist book, featuring a collection of short stories and poems.

Performances will take place in the Warehouse at 5pm each day. Drop in.

Exploring the porous and charged arena of face-to-face encounters, this body of work delves into symbiotic, sensual and disconcerting optical encounters and moments of connection. Visual and linguistic motifs slip across writing, painting, moving image and voice, emerging and dissolving through anchorless moments of contact.

This work draws on historical ideas of human connection and the performativity of bodies within them. Alongside playful allusions to the psychoanalytic relation, the theatrics of hypnosis, and animal magnetism, the work draws on an early modern belief that ‘vision rays’ from our eyes could carry spirits transmitted through blood vapours into another’s eyes, producing an infectious and affective theatre of relational bodies.

Davies’ work invites the audience to reflect on the boundaries of bodies and the tension between desire and detachment, social etiquette and expression, with a playful humour and a charged peculiarity.”

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Installation

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