SUPERCUT x MERINDA DAVIES
24 October 2022 onwards
Liminal Speculations
Merinda DAVIES / Liminal Speculations 2022 / digital image / © Merinda Davies
Liminal Speculations asks the viewer to imagine this place in 100 years.
Growing up in a big family if we needed to get somewhere we would always drive, I remember a couple of long road trips up to central QLD, hours of driving through sugarcane, playing board games in the back seat and reading billboards and making up stories from the advertising text.
Liminal Speculations is linked to larger work Conversations with the Forest and comes from a question I have on the wall of my studio where the public walking past read, “what will Surfers Paradise look like, smell, sound and feel like in 100 years?” . While I am working, kids and parents often walk past, with the kids automatically reading the question out loud to their parents. Hearing this read out loud by a kid simultaneously holds both horror and possibility. Similarly, to the experience of my Surfers Paradise studio, I wanted to reimagine this question into a statement placed on the billboard. To elicit a conversation between people together during long road trips, or reflective thought for people travelling solo, the future is constructed into reality through our collective imagination. The timescale of 100 years is important because it is still within the timescale of a human life but is also far away enough that we are forced to consider both the realities of living through the slow violence of climate change and the possibilities available if we shift to long-term thinking. This statement explores timescales of the intimate; a conversation with family or friends while driving, and the expansive; the timescales of trees, the timescale of a human life, the timescales of climates and the timescales of non-human matter. The image beneath the gradient is some of the first aerial footage shot over QLD almost 100 years ago, you can see glimpses of rivers and forests, overlayed with a softening gradient, opening a portal to a nonlinear space where we might remember forward and imagine an alternative future to the one, we are hurtling towards.
Bruce Highway
North edge of Gin Gin
Inbound Gin Gin Q 4671
(map here)
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Merinda Davies (b.1991) is an artist using performance, movement, installation, text and conversation to ask how we might reorient ourselves towards deeper care and intimacy. Her work is inspired by the environment, human and more-than-human social and ecological structures and the possibilities available to us in future imaginings. Her practice aims to find clarity and connection in the external world through deep listening, observation, and research into the emotional and physical states in our internal worlds. She grew up in Bundjalung Country, Northern NSW, and is currently living and creating on the land of the Yugambeh language group, in SE QLD. Merinda's solo and collaborative work has most recently been commissioned by; HOTA, ANAT, Performance Space (Fully Automated Human Touch, 22), Institute of Modern Art & Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (Imprints, 20 & 21), Outerspace (Supercut Billboard, 22, m0ther.online, 20), The Walls (MIAMI/MIAMI 22), and City of Gold Coast (Conversations with the Forest, ongoing).
Billboard documentation by Sabrina Lauriston.
SUPERCUT is supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government Initiative and is presented in partnership with Artspace Mackay and Northsite Contemporary Arts, Cairns.