Matilda Davis, ‘I bear witness to the world around me’, 2023-2024, oil on canvas, silk velvet, plastic pearls, synthetic filling, 130 x 100 cm
Lenke Barabasi interviews Matilda Davis about her works in paint and clay that re-imagine how things began.
Lenke Barabasi: Your work often feels like it’s building a new mythology. Do you see yourself as creating a personal cosmology through your art?
Matilda Davis: I’ve always thought about my paintings as worlds I want to live in, collages of fragments gathered from the world around me. I reference elements from religions, folk tales and symbols by smushing them together into something familiar yet uniquely mine, a kind of handmade bubble where I can exist.
LB: How do you rework the stories and symbols you inherit—from religion, science, or the occult—into your own mythmaking?
MD: I went to a Catholic school surrounded by biblical stories and imagery, which later led me to explore pagan and Celtic traditions. These overlapping belief systems and visual languages feed into how I think about symbols today, how they can be remixed, reinterpreted, and made personal.
I like to combine elements in ways that don’t appear in the original sources. In traditional Catholic art, for example, every detail has a fixed meaning, and the same goes for folk tales. But I enjoy the freedom of reshaping those meanings by mixing them together. For example, pairing a Celtic design with a medieval mosaic, or blending motifs from different times and western cultures. Through this process, I create new interpretations – where even something like an apple carries a personal meaning beyond its biblical symbolism—and bring these images into a contemporary context. This approach ties into how I see myself as a postmodern artist, building on traditions like collage and surrealism while exploring what comes next. By merging painting techniques from different eras – impressionist brushwork with Renaissance-style rendering – and combining them with symbols that weren’t originally meant to coexist, I generate fresh meanings for familiar forms. In the end, it’s about blending fragments from across time, culture, and style into a ‘symbol soup’: a layered, personal world that reimagines the visual language of the past.
When I mash different motifs together, it’s as if something is being said just beyond the reach of language. It’s a kind of visual chaos that still makes sense on a deeper, intuitive level.
Matilda Davis, ‘An Annunciation’, 2025, oil on board, fabric trim, 30 x 25 x 2.5 cm
LB: The textile frames in your works feel like structural portals. Can you talk about your relationship to textiles as a boundary or threshold?
MD: I find the cold and hard edge of a painting can sometimes break the illusion, whereas textiles make the surface feel softer and penetrable, almost like a portal you can step through. Long before I started painting I was sewing, knitting, crocheting, beading, and embroidering. At university, I tried to bring those practices together. Even though I was encouraged to focus solely on painting, I never wanted to lose that connection to textiles and the sense of making that comes with them.
‘I couldn’t afford to frame my paintings at uni; however, I hated the look of those cheap canvas edges. I had some silk left over from an embroidery project, so I tied it around in a big bow and it just worked. I’ve been doing it ever since.’
Matilda Davis, FUTURES, Melbourne Art Fair, 2024. Photo by Simon Strong.
LB: What inspired you to create padded frames for the paintings that featured at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2024?
MD: For that show, I was thinking about reconnecting to the decorative traditions of Renaissance interiors. How paintings were often surrounded by rich fabrics, draped curtains, and ornate textiles. Back then, artworks weren’t displayed in stark white galleries, but in opulent rooms filled with velvet couches, tassels, carved furniture, and heavy fabrics. Paintings hung in salons and bedrooms, framed by layers of material and luxury. That atmosphere – where art and decoration were inseparable, and where paintings existed as part of a tactile, lived-in environment – really influenced how I thought about those padded frames.
LB: Do you think of materials as part of the storytelling? Does the story lead you to the material or does the material itself suggest the story?
MD: The fabrics usually come after the paintings are finished, but sometimes, when I come across an interesting fabric or ribbon, I can already imagine the kind of work it might belong to or the mood it could complement. Once the paintings are dry, I gather them all together, lay out the fabrics and ribbons, put on my headphones, and start what I think of as a ‘dress rehearsal’. I line them up and begin to dress each one. It feels like a performance, a final act of care before they’re complete.
Matilda Davis, Infinity, 2024, glazed stoneware, 13 x 10 cm
LB: Although paintings are the central component of your practice, you also work with clay. How do the alchemical processes of clay and glaze help you bring these pieces to life?
MD: Unlike my paintings, which will eventually rot, clay objects can survive for thousands of years. That idea fascinated me, the thought of creating something that could be buried and rediscovered in the distant future. Last year, I started making small ceramic tarot cards, diagrammatic mementos or messages meant to endure, open to interpretation by whoever might find them, which were exhibited as part of the group show The Change at FUTURES.
Working with clay is also connected to my interest in the esoteric and alchemical. The process itself feels like a kind of magic. Mysterious powders of red, blue, and green melting and solidifying in fire, producing something entirely unpredictable. Unlike painting, where I can control the outcome almost to the very end, ceramics demand surrender. There’s something ritualistic about it. You prepare each piece carefully, place it in the ‘belly of the beast’ and trust the fire to decide its fate. I find that sense of creation through uncertainty both terrifying and powerful.
LB: Back to your paintings. Does ‘bearing witness’ in your painting, ‘I bear witness to the world around me’ (lead image in this article), relate to faith, observation, or creation itself for you?
MD: All of those things! There was a short period in my life when I felt quite lost—unsure of what I was doing or where I was headed. I started repeating a phrase to myself: “I’m here to bear witness to the world around me”. It became a reminder that my purpose could simply be to observe, to listen, to experience being alive. Even in the most ordinary moments, like brushing my teeth or having lunch.
“Bearing witness” has this prophetic quality to it, which connected back to my interest in religion and storytelling. The painting that grew out of that idea is deliberately overwhelming, crowded, chaotic, full of movement and tiny details. It’s about voyeurism, taking pride in only looking and being looked at.
For me, the act of witnessing is seeing both the beautiful and the difficult. It’s not easy work. Even making that painting was physically intense, my eyes darting across the surface until they hurt. But that discomfort felt important, part of the experience itself. In the end, that’s what I’m doing: bearing witness, simply being present to it all.
Matilda Davis, ‘The beginning of the universe is love’, 2023, oil on canvas, silk velvet, synthetic filling, 130 x 100 cm
LB: Tell me about the painting “The beginning of the Universe Is Love.”
MD: The starting point for this work was a painting on my first trip to Europe. I’d never experienced those kinds of paintings in person before, and seeing them up close was deeply moving. There was something alive in them. So I drew my composition from that image. It was a depiction of the Virgin Mary—the original creator—surrounded by angels, but in my version, they’ve become much creepier. The clouds swell around her, flames rise beneath, and through my own interpretation, the scene took on a surreal quality. I’m not necessarily trying to add new ideas to these traditional images, but by reworking and smushing familiar forms, their meanings start to shift. The symbolism opens up to new ideas about motherhood, femininity, faith, guilt, shame, and beauty as we understand them today.
LB: The painting seems to hold both luminous, tender elements and darker details. How do you navigate this tension, and how does it relate to the idea suggested by the title?
MD: It’s about birth. I was thinking about the Big Bang, something violent and chaotic that ultimately gives way to something beautiful. That tension is at the core of it. It’s about the journey and the reward, just like the picnic at the end of the hike.
The title and the image evolve together, and they inform each other. My personal experiences shape how I understand those words, and I try to stay open and intuitive throughout the process. Often, it feels like I’m just a vessel for an idea. I think I can best describe it as something that passes through me, and I translate it into paint. I try not to overcontrol it.
Visit futuresgallery.com.au/artists/matilda-davis and follow @tildy_davis
About Lenke Barabasi
Lenke Barabasi is from Budapest, Hungary and graduated from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in June 2025 with a Bachelor’s degree in Design Theory. Currently, she is undertaking an internship at FUTURES in Narrm/Melbourne, supported by a university scholarship.
