Frances Davis
Job title:
Teaching Fellow in Contemporary Art Theory
Biography
Frances Davis (she/her) works across contemporary arts research, practice, and education.
Recent work includes Microbursts, a series of texts that collectively develop an embodied and affective, reparative critique that considers how artists’ moving image works come into meaning(s) in atmospheric encounters between viewers and screens; Let’s Talk About the Weather, a polyphonic weather report of a changing climate drawing on the embodied experiences and observations of people across Caithness and Sutherland supported by Lyth Arts Centre, Caithness; a residency at an environmental science institution focusing on the affective experience of doing climate change research; and Love and the Ocean, a screening of moving image works in which the push and pull of tides overlap with emotional currents of desire and longing commissioned by Lux Scotland.
From 2020 until 2023, she was the coordinator of Taisbean / Curators’ North, developing and facilitating a professional development programme for curators and producers working across the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Between 2013 and 2017, she was Curator at Timespan, a cultural institution in the north of Scotland, where she led the development and delivery of a varied contemporary arts programme working with artists and others on exhibitions, residencies, off-site projects, and events.
Research interests
- Conditions of practice
- Artists’ moving image
- Experimental forms of critique
- Embodied and affective methods
- Neurodivergent methods and access in contemporary art
Frances is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Art. She is part of the core teaching team for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory and Course Organiser for Themes in Contemporary Art, a 40-credit module on this programme. She also contributes to undergraduate teaching in the School of Art, working with students from first to final year.
In addition to her work in the School of Art, Frances has contributed to courses in History of Art, on modules focusing on modern and contemporary art; and Design, teaching into Multi-Sensory Cultures, a course exploring multi-sensory experience and more-than-visual material culture and methods.
In her work as a Curator, she has also led live projects for students, creating opportunities to explore theory and practice in relation to particular contexts including peat bogs, social history archives, and (lightly) contaminated nuclear landscapes.
Frances holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Research
Research
Seemingly disparate threads of research are loosely connected as part of an ongoing enquiry motivated by the following questions: How do we weather the conditions around us? How do we live and practice today?
In past work, this has led to focuses on the effects of policy on organisational practices, and of organisational cultures on staff; and on the specific impacts of climate change and climate policy on particular environments and ecologies. More recently, my research has focused on how contemporary conditions of crisis influence how we think, make, and write about art.
Departing from Georges Méiliès revolutionary encounter with ordinary weather caught at the edges of the frame and background of the screen in the Lumières’ early film work Repas de Bébé (1895), my practice-led PhD research conceptualises moving image works as weather, to develop a meteorological method for thinking and writing encounters with artists’ moving image in a time of crisis that draws on how weather – a set of phenomena at once quotidian and extraordinary – is experienced and observed. This research is made manifest in Microbursts, a series of texts that collectively develop an embodied and affective, reparative critique that considers how artists’ moving image works come into meaning(s) in atmospheric encounters between viewers and screens.
The conditions of my own life inform other research interests in neurodivergent methods and access in contemporary art, and contemporary rural cultures and their infrastructures.
