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Char Davies - Artist Statement

Over the past 2 ½ decades, Davies has moved from the two-dimensionality and stillness of painting, through documentary film and 3D digital animation, to the body-enveloping spatiality, temporality and interactivity of immersive virtual space.

This progression was fueled not by an interest in technology but by her search for a medium more capable of realizing her artistic intent: namely, the shifting of perception beyond habitual looking-at the world as object (and image) to increasing awareness of being bodily present in the world with all its flux.

While the content of Davies' work draws on nature, her focus is not explicitly on landscape or even place, but more essentially on turning attention to how extraordinary it is to be here, embodied as we are so briefly, alive among all this.

Implicit in her work is the hope that by seeing the world less as an object, we might treat it more as our home, "caught" as we are, like every other creature (as Henry Beston so eloquently writes) "in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the Earth".

Davies' explorations have recently expanded from the virtual to the actual: working with streams, boulders, forest and the enveloping horizon—her iconic elements for more than 30 years—she is currently shaping another immersive environment, on 500 acres of land, near the Vermont border.