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For artist Joyce Davies, it’s difficult to separate art from politics, from trauma. “The political side of me has been there since the day my father was murdered, to be honest,” she said. “I wouldn’t have used that language as an eight year old, but that fight for justice and equality has been there ever since — I think it’s just coming out now through the medium of art.” Ms Davies father was killed in Glasgow’s James Watt Street Fire in 1968. An enquiry later found that high security measures implemented by various owners — including locking fire escapes from the inside — made escaping the blaze impossible for at least some of the 22 employees who died. That sense for justice pushed Ms Davies through her teenage years into all the big protests movements of the 1970s and 80s, then a decades-long career as a clinical psychologist and finally an advocacy role with workplace safety group Scottish Hazards. Now it is finding an expression in art. As her sixth exhibition, Wha Kens It Feels It, gets underway in Aberdeen, Ms Davies (now a Shetlander of more than two decades) spoke about painting big, painting politics and democratising the gallery space. “If you have a shared experience with somebody else, then you want to understand their feelings,” she said of the exhibition’s title (roughly “who knows it feels it”). “I also wanted to make it a space where it wasn’t intimidating, somewhere that people could just walk in off the street. “It’s quite easy to have an exhibition in Aberdeen and get all the white, middle-class Aberdonian intellectual people that go to art exhibitions. They have come, but I wanted to make it really accessible to anybody,” she said. Ms Davies first began concertedly creating art during wellbeing sessions at Mareel over the winter of 2019. Always self-taught, creating soon “became a daily practice,” she said. In this latest exhibition the works are bigger than before, driven by the possibilities of a much larger studio space to work in. As much as the gallery itself should be welcoming to all, Ms Davies said creating shouldn’t just be the purview of “professional” artists. “Anybody can draw, or paint — it’s just about finding your medium. It’s not about doing it really well. It’s about enjoying the process of what you’re doing.” Looking back, Ms Davies said her own political expression was stifled within the family until her mother passed. “Her grief lived with her her entire life. My mother never talked about our father and we clearly got the message that we shouldn’t either. He was a silent subject.” “But art has been nothing but a positive way to deal with the emotions that I experience,” she added. “I think I've got braver as I've got older talking about things. There are things I do now artistically that I wouldn't have done even five years ago, because I'm stronger in who I am.” Wha Kens It Feels It, curated by David McCracken, is is on exhibition Saturdays through Mondays at Outer Spaces Gallery on Aberdeen’s Shiprow till November 20th. Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.
