Working with Outset Scotland Foundation Supporter Robin Hardie and the comedian, artist and writer Siân Robinson Davies, Outset Scotland presented Davies‘ compendium of audio/film works, Conversations, to the Glasgow Museum’s collection, making a distinctive addition to the collection’s established theme of irreverent domestic surrealism, and immediately forming a key part of the new permanent display, Domestic Bliss. Click here to watch curator Katie Bruce talk about the exhibition.
In conversation with Isabella Shields in The Skinny, on 29th July 2016, Davies said:
“Conversations is about how the objects communicate and learn from each other. When two differing perspectives come together, there is the opportunity for learning. Often the characters in the conversations fail to understand each other or explain themselves, just as we humans do.
All the conversations were developed in different ways. Soup and Table came from my boyfriend’s struggle to understand that best-before dates don’t apply when you put things in the freezer, and this led to the idea that a freezer is a kind of time machine.
The objects become aware of their own roles because they have to explain themselves to another object. I was thinking how strange the things I take for granted become when I try to explain them to someone who doesn’t understand. I teach computer literacy to adults and I was once describing how Facebook works to a woman who had never encountered it, and as I was talking I was thinking, ‘Facebook is mental.'”
Siân Robinson Davies is an artist and comedian based in Edinburgh whose work encompasses performance, writing and video. She graduated from Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2007 and Applied Linguistics at Birbeck College, University of London in 2011. Selected exhibitions include: David Conroy, Seventeen Gallery, London, 2015; Ideas in things, Maria Stenfors, London, 2014; Public Building (as Internet), Transmission, Glasgow, 2013 and Semi (as Internet), Rhubaba, Edinburgh, 2012.
Glasgow Museums is the group of museums and galleries owned by the City of Glasgow, including the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA).
