Holly Davey
Dolbadarn Castle by Richard Wilson, 1760 – 65.
In this new commission by Holly Davey responding to the title of this year’s Festival ‘What You See Is What You Get’, the painting by Richard Wilson has become a metaphor for the question: Do we really get what we see? And how does an image speak to the truth?
For lying beneath Richard Wilson’s Dolbadarn Castle, 1760 – 65, is a portrait of a woman, thought to be Miss Jenkins? The original painting of Miss Jenkins? was painted sometime before Dolbadarn Castle. However, Wilson painted over the top of her portrait, turning her from vertical to horizontal, then using the curve of her body, she becomes the landscape. Not only does this action of removal eradicate her from her own story but makes her identity lost from the record across time, until there is no one to remember her, not even to know her name.
This collaboration between the two paintings speaks to a number of ideas. Firstly, how we gain knowledge from an image about our understanding of being in the world. Secondly, the representation of women within history and finally, our understanding of reality and truth within collection and archival spaces.
Quietly hidden in plain sight for over three hundred and forty years, Miss Jenkins? remained until the painting revealed its secret. She occupies Gallery 4, Art in the Eighteenth Century, unseen by the viewer, she is a shadow to herself. She sits alongside Gainsborough and Reynolds, unnoticed and representing all the unseen and unheard women’s voices through history. Past. Present. Future.
As a celebration of women within the collection and the combination of Wilson’s two paintings that encourage us to think about what we are actually looking at and question our reality, the conservation x-ray’s depicting the original portrait of Miss Jenkins? will hang in place of Dolbadarn Castle in Gallery 4.
Lying on her side, she will inhabit the gallery, visible for the first time to the audience, to enable us to reflect on what else is unknown to us, hidden from view, pushed to the edges of our knowledge.
Opening Hours
Tuesday - Sunday, 10am - 4.45pm
-
Holly Davey is a visual artist based in Cardiff. Central in Holly’s practice are ideas surrounding absence, place & the body. Working predominantly with collections and archives - with a focus on marginalised women's voices within these spaces - she produces installation works that include photography, sculpture, text, video and performance.
Recent exhibitions include A Script for an Archive: Women, University of Dundee, (2022); A Script for an Archive, Chapter, Cardiff, (2021); Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London, (2020); and The British School of Rome, (2019); as well as in 2018, The Conversation, g39, Cardiff, and The Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham Spa. Holly has taken part in residencies both national and international, and several commissions at heritage settings including The Holbourne Museum, Bath; A La Ronde, Exeter; Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery; and National Museum Wales.
In 2019, Holly was the Creative Wales Fellow at The British School at Rome, and in 2022 was nominated for a Paul Hamlyn Award.