Phoebe Davies is a Welsh artist working across moving-image, performance, print and sound. Her work is often shaped by collaborative models of working from different social and cultural sectors, including methodologies from athleticism, activism, speculative fiction and organic farming. Phoebe’s practice is formed by long-term fieldwork, regularly working with and in response to individuals, communities and locations. Through collaborating with intergenerational groups of performers and non-performers alike she generates work through performance to camera, freewriting and field recording. Her work habitually uses the lens, body and voice to explore the subtleties and tension of visceral human experiences and personal politics. Alongside her studio practice she has an ongoing collaboration with the performer and choreographer Nandi Bhebhe. As Bhebhe&Davies they direct performance work spanning stage and screen.
Recent projects have led her to work with sex educators, secondary school students, care homes, sports teams and DJs as well as art spaces and institutions, including Site Gallery (Sheffield), Heart of Glass (Merseyside), Festival of Voice, Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Tate Britain and Tate Modern (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), the Wellcome Collection (London), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, AUT), Praksis (Oslo, Norway), Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, USA). SA-UK SEASONS (Johannesburg, ZA).
She is currently one of the Wales in Venice 10 Fellows (Artes Mundi) and an artist fellow at g39, as part of the Freelands artist Fellowship Programme. She is also recipient of the British Council Social Practice Fellowship Award, Inaugural Jerwood New Work Fund, PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab Residency and was a member of Syllabus III, an alternative peer-led learning programme. Alongside her practice she currently facilitates Fieldwork, a rural residency and artist development programme in South Wales.
Bedfellows / a radical sex re-education research project (2013-2019)
Art is Action / a UK-based social practice research group (2017-2020)
Synaptic Island / a London-based womxn and non-binary DJ collective (2017-current)