“It’s always fascinated me how one takes the raw material of life and all the different ways you can shape that into something.”
The Canadian multimedia artist Moyra Davey works across film, photography, and literature, often drawing from personal experience.
She lives her life while narrating it, and her interest in the process of living and working often leads her to reveal that process within her art. “If you live your life narrating your life, I think you become really interested in how other people do it. When I make a film, I like to incorporate that because I think it’s interesting to share that with others.”
Moyra uses her apartment as her studio, enjoying a silence she didn’t have as a child, as the second of seven siblings. “Family life was really noisy. Using my apartment is maybe subconsciously related to that idea of wanting a space of my own; I didn’t have that as a kid.”
Apart from family and friends, Davey’s work focuses on the quiet, overlooked details of daily life—a practice she calls “Termite Art,” a term coined by artist and writer Manny Farber. “He’s talking about art practices that are rhizomatic and about feeling your way through things rather than having a big idea and executing it.”
Moyra Davey (b. 1958, Toronto) earned a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 1982, and an MFA from the University of California San Diego in 1988. In 1989, she attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her Early works document family and domestic spaces, while later series, such as Copperheads (1990), focus on worn objects that bear traces of human touch. Since the mid-2000s, her essayistic videos that draw on writers like Walter Benjamin and Jean Genet to blend personal reflection with literary analysis. Davey’s “mailer” works, begun in 2009, transform folded, stamped photographs into records of physical exchange. Her solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel (2010), Tate Liverpool (2013), and the ICA Philadelphia (2014), and she has participated in major group shows such as the Whitney Biennial (2012) and Photo-Poetics at the Guggenheim Museum (2015).
Moyra Davey was interviewed by Astrid Agnes Hald in October 2025 in connection with her solo exhibition ‘2HB’ at Simian in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edited by: Astrid Agnes Hald
Produced by: Astrid Agnes Hald
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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