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While serving as a committee member or Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery she exhibited in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, London, Vienna, Basel, Dundee and Buffalo. In 2003, she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale and was selected for East International in Norwich.

Davis is interested in revisiting history – in specific points in time, in art and artists and the impact they have on her daily life. Her scrupulous pencil drawings overlap these images creating a weightless lyricism, imbued with a distinct personal style.

Recent works utilize drawings and sculpture to create a three dimensional world complemented and completed by the addition of the viewer. In County Grammar, a recent group show on the role of drawing in the work of contemporary Glasgow artists, Davis’ ‘Three form Study’ – a drawing of a plinth itself and a drawing of a sculpture head from the Burrell Collection – raised questions about the nature of drawing and the relationship between sculpture and viewer.

In her recent work Davis pushes images from the natural and manufactured world towards abstraction to make meticulously rendered drawings that that play with the representation of beauty, symmetry and evolution. Using the pencil as a tool to question how our expectation of the image can alter sight, Davis attempts to offer an alternative pattern which is open to multiple readings. The drawings convey an anthropomorphic view of the objects which inhabit our immediate environment, animating the space we occupy. These surreal hybrids – a merging of both object and body part – suggest a mise-en-scene, tapping into the potential state of objects and their imaginary narratives.

Extract from Participator by Anke Kempkes, published to accompany Participant at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 27 November 2004 – 22 January 2005. When I saw Kate Davis’ drawing Untitled (2003) for the first time, I was amazed by its daringly hybrid appearance. A fleshy neck grows out of a double plinth and stretches out in an almost Baconesque, phallic way. On its top there is a kind of ‘head’. But the head’s ‘face’ has unidentifiable features. The mass of sketched structures in it looks like a wildly-grown plant. There are many of these strange creatures which Davis gives birth to in her body of work. They consist mainly of fragmented body parts: legs, arms, breasts. But their most disturbing aspect is their fusion with objects like pedestals, drapery or a table.

In these earlier works, particularly in the Applicant series, these fusions were composed by the contrasting and yet uniting operations of the synthetic collage. In the new paper works in this exhibition at Sorcha Dallas the body parts become objects and the objects become bodies. The bizarre improbability of these unions is increasingly evoked by the aesthetic manoeuvre of ‘melting’ them together; reaching at a new coherence of the image prop. What we get is a new parade of dubious objects which, in the vision proposed by the artist, are to populate, to inhabit our daily life and our domestic spheres, maybe without us being able to notice yet. It seems that Davis would like to show us that there could exist a new animated world in our environments, beneath what we consider to be common and real.