Kate Davis received the Margaret Tait Award in 2016, which culminated in the world première of her commissioned film Charity (video, 16 minutes) at Glasgow Film Festival 2017.
Outset Scotland was delighted to provide additional support for this project, allowing Davis to fully realise her ambitions and develop a new body of work to exhibit alongside the film at Stills Gallery, during Edinburgh Art Festival 2017.
Using moving image, photography, drawing and printmaking, Davis’s work questions how historical narratives are produced and perpetuated. This has often involved probing the aesthetic and political ambiguities of particular artworks, and historical moments, from a contemporary feminist perspective. Inspired by the ways in which Margaret Tait’s own films invite us to contemplate fundamental emotions and everyday activities that are often overlooked, Charity questions how the essential, but largely invisible and unpaid, processes we employ to care for others and ourselves could be reimagined. It is a darkly humorous film, in which art historical images of breastfeeding collide with surreal perspectives on contemporary domesticity.
In 2018, Outset Scotland gifted Charity (edition 1/3) to Glasgow Women’s Library and the University of Edinburgh’s Contemporary Art Research Collection.
Charity was commissioned by the Margaret Tait Award, which is supported by Glasgow Film Festival, Creative Scotland and LUX.
Kate Davis (b. 1977, New Zealand) lives and works in Glasgow. Her work reconsiders what certain histories could look, sound and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of specific art works and their reception, or re-evaluating historical moments that have been marginalised. Informed by successive waves of feminist art and theory, Davis works across a range of media, including moving image, drawing, printmaking and bookworks.
Davis has presented solo exhibitions at: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ; The Drawing Room, London; Temporary Gallery, Cologne; GoMA, Glasgow; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Museo de la Ciudad and La Galeria de Comercio, Mexico; CCA, Glasgow (with Faith Wilding); Tate Britain, London; Kunsthalle Basel; and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow amongst others. Recent group exhibitions, screenings and awards include: The Margaret Tait Award; Cinenova Presents Now Showing, LUX Cornwall, St Ives; LUX/BBC Artists and Archive commission; GENERATION exhibition, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Art Under Attack, Tate Britain; For Each Gesture Another Character, Art Stations Foundation, Poznan, Poland; eva International 2012, Limerick, Ireland; and Olinka or Where Movement is Created, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. Forthcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Stills, Edinburgh.
The Margaret Tait Award was launched in 2009 by Glasgow Film Festival, inspired by the pioneering Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918–1999). The award aims to support experimental and innovative artists working within film and moving image, and provide a high profile platform for them to exhibit their work and engage with a wider audience. Scottish artists or artists based in Scotland, who have developed a significant body of work over the past 3–10 years and are at the cusp of a major impact on the sector, are eligible for the award.
Stills is a centre for photography based in the heart of Edinburgh. It was established in 1977 and since that time it has become a champion for the important and powerful role that the medium of photography plays in the world today. Stills offers exhibitions and production facilities as well as a range of engagement opportunities for anyone to discover, enjoy and understand photography.
Glasgow Women’s Library is the only Accredited Museum in the UK dedicated to women’s lives, histories and achievements, with a lending library, archive collections and innovative programmes of public events & learning opportunities.
The University of Edinburgh’s Contemporary Art Research Collection was launched in 2015 and is driven by current research undertaken in the School of History of Art. Taking globalisation and social reproduction as its central themes, since its formation the Collection has acquired new work by Melanie Gilligan, Petra Bauer and Kate Davis with the support of The Art Fund and Outset Scotland.
