12. Liz Davis: Earthly Remains

18th April - 17th May 2008 

EXHIBIT’s twelfth exhibition, Earthly Remains, by British Artist Liz Davis, is a dedicated manifesto of the fragility of wildlife and nature.

The major part of this exhibition features an installation in the basement gallery in which a badger skeleton is treated with the reverence we usually associate with human beings. This wild animal is beautifully decorated and placed with care in a reworked burial site so as to indicate the rituals of the ancients. In the upper gallery is a related series of miniature coffins, each solemnly contains the remains of the beloved wild life recreated by Davis in different representations. Alongside these beastly sculptures which are beautifully bejeweled, Davis continues a series of paintings whose subject is influenced by the ground beneath our feet as a record of the lives and deaths of animals, birds and insects through traces and remains, exposed through layers upon layers of delicate glaze. Some of these paintings will be included in the exhibition and the process of the work is recorded photographically.

Earthly Remains hopes to raise awareness of our fragile wild life, which is under constant attack, especially by the invasion of natural habitats through humans. For this exhibition Liz Davis has created a series of funereal pieces in the hope that the viewer will become more sensitive to the senseless slaughter of wildlife in our countryside, and intends to treat the badger with a reverence in death, so that this might prompt a similar respect for the living animal.

Expressing a similar aesthetic of unrest about nature, EXHIBIT will hold in the upper gallery a retrospective of our seventh Empty Space Project – Flat Earth 2007, by Roger Coleman – A thought-provoking and beautiful photographic series of works about the impact of urban modernization on rural landscape that subtly resonate Davis’ narration of value.