Holly Davey

Holly’s research focuses on absence, place and body. She works with photography, sculpture and performance to explore the forgotten lives of women within collections and archival space. She works online and in library/museum settings, to develop visual motifs to represent their absence. This research develops from drawings to maquettes to large-scale installations.


Using the language of film production, her installations include a series of reimagined fragments from the archive as dysfunctional props, incomplete costumes and semi-constructed stage flats, that altogether create a new version of the archive for the audience to inhabit both physically and conceptually. Underpinning this, the script becomes the mechanism for reanimating the voices within the archive and forms the basis for in-person and online performances.