As part of the autumn exhibition at The Economist, Lesley Davy presented Urban Scan, an installation of two parts in The Plaza at 25 St. James’s Street.
Davy’s works are multi-disciplinary, involving printmaking, photography, sculpture and light projections. They explore images of marks made on the earth’s surface, either from a macro perspective or, as in this instance, from a microscopic one.The first part of Urban Scanconsists of photographs of microscopic scratches made by the movement of people over surfaces in urban environments, from stone pavements and concrete platforms to marble floors.
These images have been magnified and printed onto sheets of adhesive vinyl ‘floor media’, which will be placed around The Plaza, stuck flat to the concrete slabs. Accompanying this floor-based work will be a large animated light projection on the north wall of The Plaza. Visible only at night, the projection will also depict scars on man-made surfaces, but this time captured by Davy’s camera under ultraviolet light, giving the most definition to the most minute of marks.
Davy graduated from the MA Art in Architecture course at The University of East London in 2000, and also studied on the Postgraduate Printmaking course at Central St. Martin’s Art College, London in 1995. She has exhibited in the ‘Hayvend’ project at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the ICA, and at Pitshanger Museum, Ealing, with a major installation called Magnetic Field (1998). Other exhibitions include Light Wave at Orleans House Museum, Twickenham (1999), and Field at Salford University Gallery (1997).