John Davies

Description

In his early sculpture John Davies used a room or exhibition gallery as a theatre, devising spaces to see how individually made figures worked together, moving them around as an abstract sculptor might move stones or wood to form different relationships. Gesture was important and remains so today, particularly in his drawings, as does the element of story telling. Davies makes small models or maquettes and life-sized human figures which relate in tension and narrative, and has now added exceptionally large heads to his repertoire. For him these new extremes of scale provide opportunities to explore how the human figure may be perceived and how we can relate to it differently. The minute figures with their intense detail endow the viewer with authority. The large heads, with no less detail in their surface, reduce the viewer to the stature of a child, where a hand in relation to a face is tiny and the surface appears to be awesome.

John Davies spent much of the mid-1990s working on a group of large heads in an attempt to get as near as possible to his subject. Two or three of these massive heads, placed so close together that you have to squeeze between them, would give the sensation of being in a crowd; or they might be like ancient standing stones or massive rocks which were also faces. These heads pose questions for the viewer about the relevance of making figures in the late twentieth century, about the role of figurative sculpture at this time, and about the possibility of knowing ourselves. Sculpture, in John Davies's opinion, may become a talisman for the age in which it was made. Looking back at Giotto, for example, the humanity in his groups of figures, their gesture, iconography and sculptural form are as relevant now as they were five hundred years ago. They became a talisman of the early Renaissance, and possibly these heads may become ours for the end of the twentieth century.