Sorcha Dallas

A diet rich in Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas has done strange things to our view of art by women. By fore-grounding sex in such a big way, Britain’s most famous female artists have led us to expect graphic representations of genitalia or intimate tales of love and loss from practically any girl who sets herself up with a studio. Recently, however, there seems to have been a shift in the way younger artists explore the experience of women.

Your Body is a Battleground Still, the title of Kate Davis’ new installation in Tate Britain’s Art Now space, is a reference to Barbara Kruger’s work of 1989, the title of which it echoes. But while the American artist engaged with the politics of feminism in a poster-style call to arms, Davis is a conceptual artist who combines photographs, drawings and sculpture to create a narrative which is anything but direct.

The piece begins with 13 small, framed photographs along a corridor. The choice of pictures seems random: a broken plate, an open window, the head and shoulders of a woman bound to a cushion with masking tape. Each picture is scribbled over with black marker pen suggesting the hands of a clock set at different times. Around a corner, a fragment of a mattress is mounted on a white plinth, its springs clearly visible through its chopped-up sides. The shape is not random, the artist says, but cut into a wedge shape dictated by the hands of a clock in a deliberately absurd attempt to make 10 minutes of time solid. As a viewer, however, the first thing you think about is all the other beds in contemporary art, including Tracey Emin’s sordid swamp, Mona Hatoum’s torture contraptions and Rachel Whiteread’s grubby casts. The bed has become a contested space for women artists, and rarely are the connotations pleasant.

For Davis, though, the mattress also has other references. She is an artist whose work is always site specific, and in considering the Tate collection she landed on Jacob Epstein’s sculpture The Rock Drill as a source. When the sculpture was first exhibited in 1913, the famous robotic torso was mounted on a real rock drill in a kind of hard, ultra-male statement later interpreted as having been prescient of the apocalyptic destruction meted out by man and machine during the First World War. Davis’s mattress, perhaps, is a response to the ‘readymade’ nature of the rock drill – a softer object, but in its sliced-up state still heavy with the threat of disaster.

Around the mattress three drawings are mounted on the walls. In form, they correspond to Kruger’s poster-art, incorporating texts such as ‘so early’ and ‘too late’. In contrast, however, Davis’s graphics are hand-drawn in pencil, their subjects weirdly menacing. Each drawing features the head and shoulders of a woman, the face obscured by household objects taped to her head – a spatula, a sieve, a coat hanger, a toothbrush. It’s hard to fix their meaning, so surreal are the images. There is pain here, certainly, but there is also an oblique and beautiful kind of magical realism present.