26th November 2013.
Marcus Davies is a Millennium photographer living in Totnes Devon, he first became interested in photography as a boy, joining the school photography club. Although his artistic roots grew from growing up in an artistic house, his father was an art teacher at the local Totnes Art School so from an early age he was surrounded by other artists. His father built a dark room and studio for him and his brother and this was Marcus’ first contact with the medium.
Marcus is an avid collector of things, from elastic bands to postcards, he has an extensive collection of John Hinde postcards which he has sourced from boot sales and other collectors. His idea was to turn a postcard; an item intended for mass sale into art by showing them in galleries.
A John Hinde postcard from Marcus Davies’ personal collection.
Marcus’ early work was documentary in style. Below is a photograph taken of a young man during the American Football craze of the 1980s.
He later began to experiment with auto chromatic film, producing some exceptional fine art prints.
Above is an example of this technique produced by Marcus. The grey tones are almost completely lost leaving only black and white.
A later project was formed and inspired by Marcus’ young son who has Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Marcus noticed that his son preferred order and things to be predictable. He devised a game for him based on a railway track which his son had to assemble himself, of course the track follows an organised route and are predictable and organised but tiles the track was printed on could be put together in different sequences, on the one hand creating order while giving his son the opportunity to rearrange them into different shapes. His son loved this game and since then Marcus has made more than 1500 different layouts for his son.
Marcus decided to make this game more widely accessible so developed his ‘Artist’s Game’ where a set of train track tiles are sold as an art work.
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