Chapter is delighted to unveil a new work, commissioned especially for our spectacular light box feature, by Cardiff-based artist Holly Davey.

Since January this year, Davey has been using the often hidden spaces of Chapter: the stairwells; offices; roof, to experiment and explore new ways of working.

Davey uses her body pictorially to mark out a series of frozen tableaux within an otherwise fluid choreography. These 'photographic performances' take place between the artist, the camera and the audience. The viewer is only invited to see a trace of these performances as photographs. The camera becomes the artist’s audience, using the lens as a mirror; the final image is un-manipulated and remains the closest possible document to how Davey understood she would look as if viewing herself through the lens.

I Told You So, features the inaccessible rooftop of Chapter which Davey used as a space in which to move freely, dance and interact with the architecture. Each photograph taken as part of her residency acted like an imprint on that space at that moment in time and they are all linked by a series of improvised responses to the place. The final selected image that features on the Chapter frontage provides a stunning and perhaps disturbing snapshot of Davey’s interaction with the architecture of our old school building, and that of the city above and beyond it.

Holly Davey studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Recent exhibitions and commissions include: Tell It To The Trees, Croft Castle (2010); En Residencia, Laboral, Spain (2009), and Lost From View, Mission Gallery, Swansea (2008). She is undertaking a residency and commission as part of For Mountain, Sea and Sand, Barmouth in the summer.

For more information about Holly Davey’s work contact the Visual Arts Team on (0)29 2031 1050 or email visual.arts@chapter.org.