Opening 6 March at ANCA Gallery:

Tilly Davey:
Settle

Critical dates:
EXHIBITION OPENING: 6 march 6–8pm
ON VIEW: 6–29 March
Gallery HOurs: fri–sun 11–4pm

Settle brings together ceramic sculptures, oil paintings, wood carvings, and drawings that trace the artist’s process of settling into vulnerability—as a lived experience and as a shared condition of being human. Through a unified language of gestural mark-making, abstraction, and fragmentation, the works explore what it means to be physically and emotionally exposed.

This body of work marks a turning inward. Rather than observing from a distance, the artist shifts her gaze toward herself—not as an object of study, but as an active participant. Across clay, paint and wood, the works emerge from an intimate, introspective process, becoming vessels through which vulnerability is carried, resisted, and gradually expressed through form, posture, and material.

The ceramic sculptures and wood carvings isolate fragments of the body—torsos, limbs, joints—capturing sites where tension accumulates and begins to release. Clay is pressed, softened, and reshaped, while wood is cut and carved, holding resistance within its grain. These processes reflect the push and pull inherent in vulnerability itself. The surfaces are marked by expressive gestures that speak not only to physical presence, but to the emotional weight embedded within the body. These are not idealised forms; they remain tentative, open, and unresolved—embodying becoming rather than arrival.

In dialogue with the sculptural works are oil paintings and wood carvings that extend this inquiry inward. Raw, textured, and loosely figurative, the paintings map internal states through distortion and layered mark-making. The drawings operate as more immediate, searching gestures—records of hesitation, repetition, and touch—echoing the sculptural forms while expanding the emotional terrain of the exhibition.

Settle is not a conclusion, but an ongoing process: an arrival at a place where openness becomes a form of strength. Through material and gesture, the work invites reflection on what we carry, what we conceal, and how we might begin to settle into our own shared fragility.

ANCA Inc.
1 Rosevear Place
Dickson ACT 2602

Fri–Sun 11–4pm

gallery@anca.net.au
tel. (02) 6247 8736

Australian National Capital Artists Incorporated acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we live, lean and work, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people.