‘Wicklow Choral Society’
Artist Joan Davis’ exhibition, entitled Gallery as Garden will run at the Courthouse from Culture Night on September 17th, 2021. Joan will give guided tours of her exhibition on opening Night at 6pm and 7.30pm. This promises to be an exhibition opening with a difference as Joan will turn the Courthouse into a garden; a garden unlike no other. Joan will give tours of her work alongside music and dance. Musician, Helen Arthur will provide the beautiful sounds and dancer/aerial artist Katie Joyce Holmes will perform on this evening of playful creativity. Joan will have guided toursduring the course of her exhibition on the following dates:
Saturday 18th, 11am and 2.30pm
Sunday 19th, 11am and 2.30pm
Saturday 25th, 11am and 2.30pm
Sunday 26th, 11am and 2.30pm
In a very unique setting overlooking the Bray/Greystones cliff path, is a steeply terraced garden of approximately four acres. Family owned for over fifty years, the gardens have filled out with mature Cordyline trees, New Zealand flax’s, Fuchsias, giant Echiums and many more plants that can withstand a seaside environment.
There is more than a sense of the surreal about the garden but also one of tranquillity. It is a wild garden; strange, quirky and fascinating. Not for the tidy person who likes things ship-shape and in ordered order.
Even more unique are the garden installations that have evolved over the past twenty five years. Joan Davis works directly with the elements in her artistic endeavours. Each year the storms change the installations and then in the spring, she goes out and works with those changes. Most of the installations are really works in progress over the past twenty five years.
Joan says, "I consider myself to be a work in progress. Coming from a dance background and getting older, as I step out of my dancing self, the garden becomes more inhabited by dancing figures and forms made of wood ash, rotted grass cuttings and peat briquette ash as well as anything bio degradable from the garden. It is a big recycling as well.
There are several themes that run through GARDEN AS GALLERY; one is the grounded body of form. I love working with bone, most of which has been collected on Wicklow hill walks. I love working with the opposite of that, formlessness or spirit.
Another related theme arises from my interest in Jewish Mysticism and the Hebrew alphabet, letters that are forms (like our bodies) through which the light shines. How do form and formlessness meet and embrace each other is an ongoing enquiry for me. Linked to this is my life long relationship with the faery world and the magic, madness and mischief therein. There is one corner of the garden that particularly seems to hold this energy. It is always in some chaos and there is a great sense of ongoing movement mischief there."