BLOOD ON SILK/BUY SELL

BLOOD ON SILK/BUY SELL
Fiona Davies (AUS)

Blood on Silk / Buy Sell focuses on the materiality of blood. It considers the daily ritual within ICU of sampling blood for external testing. If the results are unsatisfactory, adjustments are made to the medication or treatment, a little bit of time is allowed to pass and then the blood is resampled for retesting. This process continues. Such a focus on testing also applies to the supply of blood and blood products for transfusion.

Emphasising the materiality of blood reflects on the impact of the market and in particular the black market in many parts of the world. In the domestic environment of Australia, the ability to buy and sell these products on the open market is controlled by Government regulation. Here, it is not legal to pay blood donors or plasma suppliers and there is little evidence of a black market. Other countries such as the USA do pay plasma suppliers and are now responsible for around 70% of the world’s known plasma supply. Many of the poorer states, such as Alabama, are blood and plasma exporters.

Fiona Davies (Australian born 1955) is a multimedia artist using video, sound and object. Her work is social, political, scientific and emotional, responding to the liminal spaces of medicalised death in an Intensive Care Unit. She has undergraduate degrees in Applied Science (Textile Technology) and Visual Arts, an MFA from Monash and is currently enrolled in the PhD program at SCA. She has exhibited in many locations, often supported through artist residencies such as a two month 2016 residency at Das KloHäuschen and Villa Waldberta in Munich, Germany.