Lara Davies Welsh, b. 1985

Lara Davies (b. 1985, Maesteg, Wales) lives and works in London. Her work is held in both private and public collections, including the Contemporary Art Society of Wales and the AllBright Mayfair Members’ Club. In 2022 she graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art.  Davies has exhibited widely, including in the 2018 John Moores Painting Prize and the 2017 National Eisteddfod of Wales.

Davies’ recent paintings began as an attempt to paint the longing for her beloved country, that is, up until she realised she wasn’t the least bit homesick. She instead turned to her new house, which provided a novel backdrop to everyday life. The striped wallpaper of her shared accommodation became a way in to negotiate the historical legacies of the engagements with place and potential in painting–from Pierre Bonnard to Daniel Buren. Her paintings act as photograms, absorbing the evidence of communal existence, and a London life she unexpectedly loves. A sense of longing is still palpable in the languid surfaces of her paintings full, as they are, of a grubby nostalgic interiority located in relationships to space.

Lara Davies’ ‘stripes’ evoke memories of domestic space but also touch on the faded seaside towns that structured her childhood: deckchairs in the sand, awnings and windbreaks sheltering hardy beachgoers recovering with a luke-warm flask of tea. The paintings of Lara Davies speak to the resonance of place and memory, relations and time that structure our lives.