At the Farm with Artist Robert Davies, Wolverhampton Museum

The Horsebox Gallery
Sep 4, 2014 9:34AM

Robert Davies - Animal Series - Wolverhampton Museum & Acton Scott Historic Farm , March 2011 - May 2011 

ANIMAL SERIES 

The drawing series was inspired firstly by renowned racehorses and also from regular visit to Robert’s local animal sanctuary in Offenham, Worcestershire.  

 Robert remarks: “Racehorses are held in high esteem and often given human characteristics when they are described: they are ‘strong’, ‘brave’, ‘spirited’, ‘intelligent’.  

The animals of food production are measured by their productivity (‘conversion’) and treated in a way that reflects this.

“The horses are all great champions of both flat and National Hunt racing.  The animals of food production were originally used on farms, but each was sold, discarded or lost due to ill health, poor conversion or bad weather.  Now they live at the Farm Animal Sanctuary, in Worcestershire.  My intention with this work is to reinterpret our relationship to these animals through representation.”

This new turn from photography to drawing has received international interest and the series is to be exhibited as a whole in Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery in March 2011 entitled Animals.

Robert graduated from the London College of Printing in 1988.  After working as a cycle courier in London he worked in a street hospital in Calcutta, India. 

Subsequently he lived in a VW capmer van for a year travelling throughout the United Kingdom taking photographs.  With the resulting series Robert was able to gain a place to do an MA at the Royal College of Art. 

Currently Robert works full-time as an artist and in the last few years he has worked on a number of projcets: large drawings of both racehorses and the animals of food production; making large abstracts of the night sky in the deserts of Iran & the US; with FIFA and the footballer Pele on their centenary project; with Richard Williams, chief sportswriter of the Guardian, on a book called '90 minutes' and with the BAR Honda Formula 1 team. 

Robert’s work is in public and corporate collections such as: University of Michigan Museum of Art USA, Cleveland Museum of Art Ohio USA, Le Musée Elysée Lausanne, Switzerland, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, The Economist London, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland and FIFA. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpua_khLzao

The Horsebox Gallery