Fragments of the three site specific installations, Memorial / Double Pump Laplace I, II and III will be exhibited at Culture at Work from 17th to 29th April 2012 titled Blood on Silk: Preliminary.

At this point, midway through the three year Blood on Silk project, an opportunity has been realised to re-examine the installations that formed the preliminary concept of the project. These site specific works were a response to the ten and a half months that the artist’s father spent in hospital before dying in late 2001. For four and half months of that time he was in intensive care at R.P.A. and smaller amounts of time in high dependency at Fairfield Hospital.

One of major issues considered in the works is the domestication of the daily rituals of intensive care including the taking blood samples. Marian Benjamin in the 2006 catalogue acommpanying Memorial / Double Pump Laplace I wrote of that work. “Once you know your way around you no longer need to read the signs, they are just there, part of everyday life, habitual. And there is comfort in habit……… Death too is unremarkable. We all die. It is an experience of which we are all aware. And yet our experiecne of death, of loss, of grief is far form unremarkable.”

More images and information on the three installations are on www.fionadavies.com.au