Eight Blocks or a Field (Bone Doll II) (2013/2016)

Kate Davis’s work questions how historical narratives are produced and perpetuated. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of specific artworks and their reception, or re-evaluating marginalised historical moments. Informed by successive waves of feminist art and theory, she works across a range of mediums, including drawing, moving image, printmaking and photography. Her art often refers to the body, either through visual representation, as an underlying idea, or the way in which it is created.

For the exhibition Eight Blocks or a Field (Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2013), Davis made drawings and sculptures as well as a video that reconsider the use value of certain objects that have become redundant or obsolete. Part of this exhibition included a group of four acutely observed portraits of ‘emergent’ dolls, rendered in the style of nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). The dolls are part of the Edward Lovett Doll Collection, housed in the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh, and were made from discarded shoes, bones and fabric scraps by children living in deprived areas of London, in the 1890s. After originally completing the drawings in 2013, Davis revisited the images while in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand. At this stage the artist added the background settings that were adaptations from portrait drawings by Ingres.

The additions not only ground and provide context for the doll figures, but also allude to class and status, recurrent themes in Ingres’s works.

The Eight Blocks or a Field series are Davis’s first works to join the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) collection. As the artist lives and works in Glasgow, the acquisition meets the Gallery’s core objective to represent the breadth of Scottish art. It also contributes to the Gallery’s ongoing endeavour to represent work by influential female contemporary artists more widely. Furthermore, the subject matter and form of Davis’s works allow for meaningful links to be made with the historic and portrait holdings of the NGS collection that span the early Renaissance to the present day.

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