Blue Elms

Angelina May Davis (1966 - )

oil on canvas

2020

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  • About the work
    Location
    Country: UK
    City: London
    Place: Government Art Collection

    Blue Elm comprises two separate canvases. On the larger one, a few ragged trees are painted on what appears to be a stage and set against a painted backdrop. In the distance is the blue tree that gives the painting its name, and that echoes the elm tree painted on the smaller canvas to the left. Angelina May Davis has a longstanding interest in landscape painting, rural scenes and in how colour is experienced as memory. This work uses landscape to spotlight what Davis has termed ‘fabricated realities’ – through the metaphor of the English Elm. Often a key feature of English landscape painting, the elm disappeared from the landscape itself in the wake of Dutch Elm Disease. Davis sees the elm as a symbol of loss, of nostalgia and of ‘a distant idea of Englishness’. She is interested in how the past shapes us and how the nostalgia associated with this past might sometimes be ‘fabricated’ or constructed in the same way as a theatrical set. ‘The layers of inequality in society,’ she says, ‘still seem to be rooted in the hierarchies of history.’ Colour is also a key part of her art practice. As someone with synaesthesia, a condition where most things including numbers or words are articulated in her mind as a colour, she works with a particular colour palette that holds layered meanings for her and offers a depth of visual experience for her viewer. 


  • About the artist
    Angelina May Davis received her BA at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry in 1988 and her MA at the University of Central England in 1998. After a series of solo exhibitions at Ikon Gallery Birmingham (1991); City Gallery, Leicester (1992) and MAC, Birmingham (1993) she set her art practice aside to focus on motherhood. In 2014, she began showing work again, at galleries in Birmingham, where she lives, and surrounding areas. She was included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2021, showing at Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery. Between 2021-22 Davis returned to art school at Turps Banana and has since had solo exhibitions at Oxmarket Gallery in Chichester, and shown work in group exhibitions at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Art House Worcester (both 2022).
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    Materials & Techniques
    canvas, paint, oil, oil paint, oil painting
  • Details
    Title
    Blue Elms
    Date
    2020
    Medium
    oil on canvas
    Dimensions
    height: 154.0 cm; width: 274.0 cm
    Acquisition
    Purchased from New Contemporaries, March 2022
    Provenance
    New Contemporaries, from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 7 March 2022
    GAC number
    19041