Louise Davidson
... "we saw him throw to swift flood/a girl alive with his hook through her lips" are lines from Dylan Thomas’s poem “The Long Legged Bait". Moved by this graphic image Louise Davidson began to draw an image of a threaded and arrowed hook through the female bodies in her work. The associations of violence and pain with the hook confront most viewers of Davidson's recent work. Associations with the emotional connections and consequences of ‘hooking up with a partner' or being 'hooked on’ a partner are subsequently often overlooked. Yet that anguish is one of the underlying sub-themes of this exhibition. There are two main themes through the show and these inform each other. An exploration of the notion of femininity informed the earlier pictures which involve the images of cocoons, seeds, and mangroves. The most recent works are concerned with the nature of falling in love and posit femininity as being part of both the male and female psyche.
The body of work has a brooding quality, a sense of positive meditation on, and an attempt to define, the mysteries within the subconscious especially in relation to one’s ‘feminine’ nature. This quality of darkness is apparent in the three drawings Amongst the Mangroves (I, II and III). In these charcoal images there is a quality of impenetrability, a quality of moments fleeting, of indefinable substance, and of seeing through the gloom. The images use the tangible world of the mangroves, which has a semblance of order but where in fact there is no regularity nor predictability, to mirror a person's internal emotional and spiritual world. To an extent all the work is autobiographical, although Davidson