Paintings by Davina Stephens at Ganesha Gallery,
Four Seasons Resort, Jimbaran Bay. Tel: 701010.
Davina Stephens was born in New Zealand in 1968, but she grew
up in places as diverse as America, India and Bali. Since
the start of her career, Davina’s work has embodied
a singular vision framed by a global sensibility. Reviewing
a previous exhibition, ‘Baliwood’ (Bali Advertiser,
September 2004), I spoke about Davina’s immense ‘joie
de vivre’. I noted her taste for the humor, ironies,
chaos and incongruities found in a precarious world full of
rapid change. America, India and Indonesia are all countries
offering an eclectic mix of great spectacle and fantasy, and
each culture, in its own way, offers rituals of color, action
and drama. Davina’s sketch-like paintings, I felt, were
more like excerpts from a personal journal which celebrated
the exciting world she found herself deeply immersed in. With
her new exhibition, enigmatically entitled ‘Days of
Future Passed’, much of Davina’s spontaneous sketch-like
qualities have matured into contemplated works, which display
immense insight, exuberance and an inexhaustible energy. Like
her previous exhibition, this new body of work is also permeated
by her great love of Bali, India, the Ocean and Womanhood.
In her exhibition, Davina continues her experiments with mixed
media. She creates collages that utilize personalized woodcuts.
These are hand printed onto rice paper, while acrylic paint,
inks, gold-leaf, and even the Indonesian woman’s art,
batik cloth, can find themselves incorporated into her works.
Davina describes her technique as ‘layering, which suggests
archaeology, a science that strips away layers to reveal the
past, and poster billboards whose each subsequent layer represents
the future’. In Davina’s current work, her past
themes are all revisited, but they are reinvented with a new
vocabulary of line and form. The paintings tend to a ‘poetic’
disorganization of our reality, as her canvases are pastiches
literally layered with familiar decorative motifs, objects
and figures which seem to float and mingle, creating her own
personal reality. All bathed in a glorious, luminous light.
The painting ‘Wrapped in Gold’ is a flamboyant
evocation of the spirit of typical Balinese village life.
Scattered throughout the work can be found images such as
a family watching television, shoes lined up at the entrance
of their house, a chain handrail of a bamboo bridge leading
to a secluded villa, swaying street decorations and the omnipresent
fragrant frangipani flowers. These fragmented images from
reality, dispersed across the canvas, make a dazzling display
of pattern and line which epitomizes the diversity of Balinese
life. The golden highlights imply that mysterious light often
seen in Bali at dusk. It is a magical work that pays homage
to the mysticism of Bali.
On the other hand, Davina’s work ‘Sea of Milk’
depicts an Asian Fantasy of her own creation. Borrowing from
a variety of influences, within this work can be found traces
of traditional Chinese, Indian and Balinese landscape painting
techniques. Interspersed throughout this curious landscape,
filled with visual puns, can be found everything from a Japanese
‘Rising Sun’, to a television Pop Icon such as
the ‘Monkey Warrior’, and, hidden away in the
bamboo, the presence of a Bengal Tiger. The work is a fusion
of unrelated realities that is enigmatic but also irresistible,
imposing onto the viewer the artist’s vision of her
world, which disrupts our own shaken sense of reality.
Davina’s love of the Ocean is evident in her work ‘Mantra’.
Below the surface of the water can be found gigantic sting-rays,
and the strange skeleton shapes of ancient crustaceans. Yet
again, these pleasing patterns rhythmically move across the
canvas, while, on the surface of the sea, ghostly images of
antiquated trading vessels appear to be involved in a sea
battle or skirmish. The message here is associated with the
primordial nature of the Ocean, the source of all life, and
also a source of great wealth, well worth fighting over, which,
however, can never be conquered or tamed. Davina presents
an aquatic fantasy full of intriguing and haunting imagery.
Finally, Davina explores Balinese Womanhood in the spectacular
canvas ‘Pekelem’. Rows and rows of Balinese women
are found lined up on a beach, paying homage to the Gods.
Within the sea can be seen gigantic shells and fish, the bounty
of the Ocean, which the women are harvesting and honoring.
The repetitious patterning of the work indicates the repetitious
nature of the Balinese Hindu religion, and the formal role
that women play in traditional Balinese worship. Yet, with
an almost magical sleight-of-hand, Davina also presents a
more sensual and erotic image of Balinese women in the ‘sexy’
painting ‘Seas Future Passed’. Here, a voluptuous
odalisque languishes on her cushions, while ‘thought-bubbles’
of sexual congress float above her. Together these works encapsulate
the duality of Balinese women. The reticent and retiring ‘public’
woman, and the desirable temptress only revealed in ‘private’.
The paintings have a political edge, for they depict the social
restraints placed on Balinese women, and women in general,
as well as act as a critique of the conventional depiction
of women as stereotypes. The works are a reconciliation of
opposites. Woman as Venus, the Goddess of Motherly Love, and
Woman as Venus, the Goddess of Lust and Libido.
On first glance it is easy to be seduced by Davina Stephens’
work. The lush, rich, colors, textures and exotic motifs create
images of a very decorative and pleasing nature, but, after
quiet contemplation of the paintings, her themes gradually
emerge, and these messages imbued the works with an overwhelming
strength. Davina’s self-effacing robust humor, combined
with her sharp social observations, presented with enticing
moments of paradox and irony, results in a collection of work,
from this evolving artist, which can only be called stunning.
Davina’s exhibition is highly recommended.
