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load. Ivor Davies. [Making performance] was a kind of fulfilment of a wish I’d had five years or so earlier to try and extend painting and collage out into space and have actions in it, to have a kind of proscenium stage and to have objects coming out into three dimensions and to have movement and struggle and so on. […] What I felt a part of was a kind of performance work which didn’t involve the artist. The artist constructed it, stood back and operated it, almost like a machine. |
Ivor DaviesThu 12 Oct 2006 (as part of EXPERIMENTICA 2006) One of the foremost figures in contemporary Welsh art, painter, writer and activist Ivor Davies, a native of Penarth, taught Art History at Edinburgh University and Newport College of Art. He received a doctorate from Edinburgh for his thesis on the Russian avant-garde and has published many scholarly articles on the modern period in both the English and Welsh languages. For nearly twenty years now he has painted full time. A synthesis of ancient Celtic and modern Welsh issues expresses a struggle for cultural and national identity in his work, which appears in many public and private collections.
Always interested in the most radical art movements, during the 1960s Davies was central to Destruction in Art, creating a series of performances involving anatomical diagrams and explosives. His Adam on St Agnes Eve at Swansea University in 1968 was one of the first Happenings to take place in Wales. Ivor Davies was in conversation about his performance work in the 1960s, the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 and his involvement with the Beca group. |
