Penelope Davis is a Melbourne-based artist working with photography and sculptural installation. Davis’ photographic work is created without a camera.
More recently Davis has been creating jellyfish forms from a collage of components in a similar way. Taking the detritus of contemporary technologies and combining these with organic source material such as leaves and seaweed, Davis makes casts in silicone, then uses these casts themselves as forms. The artist hand sews these ‘skins’ together to create delicate hybrid forms that resemble jellyfish. These works reflect on, and embody, a painstaking attempt to recuperate an appreciation for the natural world, our symbiotic relationship with it, and the necessity of our shared future.
Davis has been a selected finalist in several other award exhibitions such as the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2022), Gordon, NSW, Josephine Ulrich and Wynn Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Gallery, Queensland (2007 & 2009); the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (2007), Monash Gallery of Art and the Fremantle Print Award (2007), Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia. She was also a finalist in the Moet and Chandon Touring Exhibition, touring all Australian State Galleries in 1999. In 2007 Davis exhibited with 2 other artists, Joyce Kohl and Stephen Haley, at LA Artcore in Los Angeles. In 2012 an extensive survey exhibition of Davis’ work, Phototropic, was held at the Academy Gallery in Launceston.
Recent curated exhibitions include Art and Gender, Justin Art House Museum (2022), Telling Tales, Glen Eira City Gallery, Antipodean Emanations: cameraless photographs from Australia and New Zealand, Monash Gallery of Art (2018), Divine Abstraction, Justin Art House Museum (2016), Ex-libris – the book in contemporary art, Geelong Gallery (2014), Perceptions of Space: Justin Collection, Glen Eira City Gallery (2021)(2014), Missing Presumed Dead travelling to regional galleries in Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia (2013), Interieur-Exterieur at Lumas Galleries, Paris (2010), and The Apple Project, AC Institute, New York (2010).