User:Cara Davies

Cara Davies is a performance artist and hobbyist archivist. Currently doing a PhD at the University of Bristol she works as a researcher for the AHRC funded project Performing Documents: modelling creative and curatorial engagements with live art and performance archives supervised by Prof. Simon Jones and Dr. Paul Clarke.

Activating an interdisciplinary approach to practice-led research, Cara generates documentative artworks and archives that challenge the identity, function and itinerancy of the body. Her praxis primarily raises issues of archival lacunae, re-presentation of documentation, the juxtaposition of the live and documented body, and the re-documentation of documents; scrutinizing the construction, re-use and dissemination of archival materials within live art.

Interweaving a professional practice with institutional study Cara’s working processes stem from her undergraduate studies in Dance and Performing Arts (University of Chichester, 2008) where helping to develop the University's Digital Archive for Research in the Visual and Performing Arts, under the guidance of Dr. Jem Kelly, prompted her to pursue an interdisciplinary connection between the role of archivist, documenter and performer. Working across the mediums of dance, video, multi-media installation, online broadcasting and site-responsive performance, Cara interrogates the intersection of archival and performative theory, physically and digitally critiquing traditional strategies for archiving in a live art/performance paradigm. Therefore, embracing the confluence in her roles as a performer, documenter, and archivist, Cara’s artwork attempts to facilitate an open, honest and upfront exchange, invoking audience participation, reflection and interaction to activate relationships between memory, site, personal histories and corporal experience. Cara’s academic interest in performance was honed through her European-networked Masters degree: Contemporary Arts Practice and Dissemination, at Dartington College of Arts (2010). Here she explored questions of artistic processes, production and communication, in specific relation to the documentation and archiving of contemporary performance. More recently Cara has collaborated with a variety of choreographers, musicians, archivists and performance artists, working for instance as part of the documentation team at Marina Abramovic's symposium The Pigs of Today Are The Hams of Tomorrow (2010), performing with Sardinian-based collective Carovana S.M.I on their project Paesaggi Interrotti (2009), and becoming a founding member of the research collective Tracing the Pathway (2011). She has presented work in Spain, Utrecht, Finland and Turkey; and was one of Colchester Art Centre’s selected Escalator: Live Art artists (2011), receiving an [Arts Council England] Grants for the Arts Award, for the durational performance-as-research project Instability in Stability.