Dead Flowers

Woods Davy works with stones in natural, unaltered states, collected from the sea or the earth, and assembles them into fluid and precarious sculptural combinations that appear weightless. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot has observed that Davy's work is "a collaboration between artist and nature," one in which the artist "prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials."

In this new series of work, Davy has gathered dead, bleached coral from the shores of various Caribbean islands. Before they died, these pieces of coral bloomed with colonies of living polyps, glowing with brilliant colors. He has now given them a new symbolic life, calling attention to global warming and other man-made distress factors that have created negative effects on our ocean's environment. At once contemporary and archaic, these lifelike, pregnant forms manifest a calm reductive force, as they appear to rise to the surface of the ocean, or drift upwards to the skies. Evoking ancient Cycladic sculpture in their paleness and purity of form, while simultaneously addressing environmental issues of our own time, these works reference the past and invoke thoughts about our future.