John Davis 1936-1999
John Davis artwork. I took these images when I visit Melbourne NGV (National Gallery Victoria)
November 2010.
This was my very first time setting eyes on John Davis's artwork.
It was the very last day of his exhibition and I had just stumbled into it. Until that point in time I had no idea he or his work even existed. I just walked and walked amongst his pieces in total awe. I had played with native sticks and leaves all my life here on the west coast of Australia and had never even imagined that another Australian artist could have created artworks out of them similarly to me. In my research throughout my life I had only found diverse native peoples of the world who had created practical tools or sacred objects from sticks or leaves similar to my work. I had kept copies or cuttings of these examples in a small file so I could inspire my spirit and creative self when I felt disconnected from my creative guiding force.
Living all my life Western Australia and being so totally isolated from the rest of the world I had no idea that John Davis and his artworks existed. On that day, in the National Art Gallery of Melbourne, walking through the many rooms of John Davis’s artworks I felt completely at home and felt like a starving person who had finally found a banquet of beautiful food that would never run out. I would never go creatively hungry again.
I crawled around each piece of his art dissecting every knot, every stick, every added embellishment. The story behind each art piece spoke very loudly and went right into the very centre of my creative being. John Davis’s creative journey growing up in the Australian bush during those years and watching the way humans impacted on the native vegetation and what those impacts meant to all the living creatures dependent on those environs echoed my story here on the west coast of Australia in so many similar ways.
How confirmed I felt now in my own art practices. All my creative struggles over the past 50 years all just melted away in that time it took me to walk amongst John Davis's artworks there in the Melbourne Gallery.
The largest reality check that struck me like I had been hit by a charging bull was I had been trapped in my drawing and painting two dimentual world where I had to except I could also sculpt. I was free from the flat world and now could create multi dimentual works of art. Without that reality check I could never have taken my artwork to where I needed to now.
At art school, the little I did do throughout different stages of my life, I was told that drawers and painters and sculptures were three very different arts practices and that you only could be one of these.
When I attempted to find images of his artwork and further information about John Davis on the internet, when I returned home from Melbourne, I was struck by how little there was. After reflecting on this it dawned on me that the availability of the general community to access the Internet and creating your own web pages predated Johns life. Why should there be any visual collection of his work on the internet as he had well and truly passed away by the time the internet was very accessible to the main stream Australian. Other than a book the Victorian Art Gallery had compiled to go with John Davis’s exhibition at the NGV and the images I had taken on my visit there there is nowhere else to go to explore his artworks at length that I have found.
All my paper pulp bowls that I made since seeing John Davis artwork were inspired by his paper Mache rocks and bowls. For the past three years I have tried with no success to create sacred bowls out of clay. Here in Perth Western Australia ceramic artists were everywhere in the 70 and 80’s but no longer.
Elian Keys, a very well known ceramic artist back in the 50’s was able with some help from others in the arts community here successfully got ceramic classes and kilns into the majority of Primary School in this state. As soon as computers arrived on the scene in the late 80’s education took a very wide birth away from the arts and every school slowly follow the new trend to direct all their attention to setting up computer labs.
With this state’s very small population only a hand full of local artists can make a reasonable living selling to local communities mainly at Christmas stalls and a few country Galleries. The very large community of ceramic artists that were her have shrunk right back. Trying to get the advice I was looking for to work out how to get what I wanted my ceramic sacred objects to look like just did not happen.
When I saw John Davis’s paper Mache rocks and bowls I realised that paper pulp would be perfect for what I had been wanting to create with my loved native vegetation.
