Gerwyn Davies

Sunshine Coast National Art Prize 2026 - Finalist

_{Image courtesy of artist.}

Gerwyn Davies
NSW

Meat tray
2025
Wall-based textile made from repurposed costumes; felt, fringe, lame, lycra, pleather, polyester thread, rhinestones, sequin, spadex, tulle, vinyl, powdercoated metal pole and brackets
145 x 95cm

With a primary focus on photographic self-representation and costume design, the textile work Meat Tray represents an evolution in Davies’ personal practice. This wall-based work is fabricated from a series of distinct, sculptural costumes that have each been disassembled and then reconfigured together in a glittering new form.

In a declaration of Davies’ deep affection for the lurid and the lowbrow, Meat Tray is a textile patchwork of everyday signage commonly encountered down the nation’s bowlos. Here however, the vernacular aesthetics of suburban Australiana are queered. Rendered in rhinestone, spandex and sequin, the readily familiar is transformed and brought to life through a vibrant materiality.

In line with Davies’ broader photographic and costume works, Meat Tray explores the aesthetic potentials of camp — a strategy that toys with taste, visual abundance, material excess, and the stressing of surfaces that shimmer, shine, and radiate with queer states of in/visibility