Join the artist, Fiona Davies, as she talks about her artistic practice and the on-going project, Blood on Silk.

Fiona Davies is a PhD candidate at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. For Blood on Silk: Last Seen, Davies will transform the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre Turbine Hall into five suspended hospital rooms with handmade silk paper, featuring projected still and moving images replicating the endless activity of a hospital environment. This commission is a continuation of Davies’ Blood on Silk project examining medicalised dying within a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. Her personal experiences supporting her father during his terminal illness intimately inform Davies’ art practice; particularly the daily ritual of taking blood samples. Davies frequently works in cross-disciplinary collaborations forming conceptual framework incorporating specific scans related materiality, cultural viewpoints and the economics of silk and of blood; addressing issues of surveillance and associated concerns about human rights. The ‘Blood on Silk’ project began as a cross-disciplinary collaborative sharing of ideas between Davies, the late Dr Peter Domachuk, School of Physics University of Sydney and writer Dr Lee-Ann Hall; in relation to Domachuk’s research into developing an implantable silk microchip. This biophotonic silk microchip aimed to provide a platform within the human bloodstream allowing the properties of blood cells to be determined or measured while those cells are still within the body. The chip transmits internal bodily information into the outside public space; challenging how we think about the materiality of the human body as an enclosed private space of intimate living systems. Blood on Silk: Last Seen frames this transition between spaces and stages of life in relation to hospital entrances and the architecture of the Turbine Hall. Merging the representation of public and private spaces Last Seen presents a new understanding of Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre as a public space that owes much of its dynamism due to human traffic flow. By linking the audience’s movements to the emotional landscape that carers and visitors to hospital environments experience, Davies’ installation will be an experience of layered points of both confronting and inevitable transitions. The fluid materiality of the silk sheets frames and directs these movements, conjuring on a macro scale how silk is used in biomedical procedures inside the human body.