Michelle Davies
Artist
Michelle Davies
Michelle is a professional artist and educator with more than 30 years experience. Describing her work as Expressive Landscape she explores her visual and visceral connections to the landscape. Michelle produces paintings from both her studio in Milton Keynes - which is part of the artsgateway community - and plein air during her frequent visits home to the Pembrokeshire coast; an area which has had a profound effect on her and her practice.
Michelle has always been fascinated by the physicality of paint and mark making. Her work is an emotional exploration of life and these principles. She is obsessed with how materials repel each other and enjoys working with these limitations in her work; not knowing the direction each piece will take. This ranges from tar to cyanotype. Integral to her work are also the inclusion of found objects she incorporates into the surface. This could be driftwood she’s printed on, remnants from her family’s fishing history or charred wood - exploring the high/low of materials and confronting the notion of traditional oil painting.
In her current series Liminal Times she explores the concept of liminal. That which is a threshold, an in-between place, a place of transition, a time of waiting and not knowing. Her technique, ranging from slow and meditative mark-making to frenetic bursts of energy encapsulates the dynamic interplay of these concepts. Michelle’s irreverent approach to painting often incorporating diverse materials from precious gold and copper leaf to fragments of found objects, the juxtaposition of the sublime and the mundane creates a rich tapestry that mirrors the complexity of this liminal time.
Work from this series is currently being exhibited in Goat Street Gallery, St Davids, West Wales Arts Centre , Fishguard and in an upcoming exhibition in Westbury Arts Centre, Milton Keynes.
With the freedom afforded by her new studio Michelle has an exciting profile of opportunities and exhibitions coming up.