Tracing The Cooper is haunted by the presence of things unseen. Born from a two-week expedition, including six days navigating Cooper Creek by tinny, deep in country so ancient the air holds the texture of lore, Emma Davies returned not with a document of place but with a tessellated residue that now inhabits every work.
Wall hangings cast from bone are arranged with ceremonial symmetry. Polypropylene transfigured into forms that recall net and membrane, the permeable boundary between worlds. Motifs resembling the branching of trees, the splay of ribs. Moving image steeped in Victorian rust and fallow, the landscape's own rhythm played on repeat.
Throughout, Davies works with the geometries nature assumes so effortlessly: spiral, bilateral fold, radial pattern, a language that speaks beneath the threshold of the conscious and reaches something primal. A dim recognition. Contours our bodies have always known.
