STATEMENT OF WORK

Leigh Davis

I am an interdisciplinary artist and educator based between Brooklyn, NY and Washington DC. My work explores grief, memory, and storytelling – how these universal experiences help define what it means to be human. My work is site specific; I am drawn to contexts that present their own spirituality, using this intrinsic human quality to complement the stories I tell through my installations. Trained as a photographer, my work now ranges across media, from sculpture and installation to sound, performance, and video.

In recent years, I have been producing a body of work about end-of-life experiences (ELEs)—in particular, how they help us understand the emotional intricacy of grief and the ways in which we construct our beliefs about human consciousness and a possible afterlife. My project Inquiry into the ELE, is a collaborative study between myself and other ELE experiencers. The project takes the form of a filmic essay featuring illustrated true accounts of individual end of life experiences during, or following the death of a loved one. Making connections between the past and present, fact and fiction, and the objective and private spheres, the work invites audience participation and speculation about the boundaries between the physical world, the emotional world, and what may exist beyond.

My recent video installation, Feeling Tones, explores how humans are conditioned to predict the future through manipulating memories of the past, a process which is complicated by the uncertainty of death. In 2021, I began building an archive of interviews with a range of people about their imagining of what happens to us when we die. I foresaw these accounts would inform a study of the way we use abstraction, imagery, and non-linear narrative to process discomfort, or imagine decisions based on our assumptions about the stories of our life and death.

In addition to solo work, I create projects that intersect with a broad range of communities­: from the Residence series created with residents of the YWCA Brooklyn, to Quiet Service, a project centering Baltimore religious institutions, to Secular Columbarium for the Island, a mythological exploration of the Southwest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. In these projects and others, a key aspect of her practice is collaboration with community partners, including Clermont Historic Site (NY) and Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn), where I designed site-based audio installations featuring songs from the Threshold Choir, who seek to ease the transition between living and dying. My projects with the Threshold Choir have been specifically created to encourage community participation and discussion, with opportunities for individuals of various ages, cultural, and spiritual backgrounds to come together and share a physical and emotional space. My ongoing process ties into my work about consciousness and end of life, as both are interested in the concepts of relic and afterlives—in what remains after a person or moment has passed, and how we can remember, capture, and celebrate the departed in tangible, collaborative ways. Ultimately, I am committed to creating public representations of introspective experiences, helping to commemorate and make visible these transitory experiences which might otherwise be lost to time.