Artist
Matilda Davis
https://www.instagram.com/tildy_davis/
I’m revisiting what a drawing can be and how that can be representative of the self. I find it hard to take photos of myself, and editing a photo of the self I always forget what the original looks like or what I look like and that feels damaging. When I take a drawing and analyse it and run it through filters and collage it onto its self I can utilise these “edits” and explore a changing self without risking my own .
I’ve spent the last few years focusing on painting but now working from home I’ve shifted back to drawing a lot. I see drawing as the original Art. The most basic form of line and shade everything can come from a drawing. A drawing can represent anything and is mostly free from strict material context, a drawing can be casual, and in that I feel more comfortable to change it and see what comes out of it.
These two works specifically are about being locked in, not so literally but maybe feeling more blocked than anything. Stuck behind walls of line and colour, surrounded by the grid brimming with symbolism that you cant help but compare it to yourself stuck in the middle a mirror surface only looking back at you.

background drawings are A3 with A4 center drawing and these are oil pastel and graphite on cotton rag paper made in 2020

background drawings are A3 with A4 center drawing and these are oil pastel and graphite on cotton rag paper made in 2020
“These works for me are about printing and reframing and how a work changes when you pair them together and run them through effects, and that in turn is about representation of the self and how that is warped through our reframing abilities and editing processes; its like a feedback loop of photo-scan-rescan-photograph-collage-print-rescan.”
The next three images were made by Davis in response to the two images above
diary pages are self portraits but not until you look over them for the second or third time
drawings before edits but edited by your eyes and thoughts when you look at them again


