Sophie Davis

Editor

Working
Together: 
A Parliament 
of Fog

Featuring contributions by the chasing fog club (Est 2014), Sophie Davis, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Deborah Rundle, and Layne Waerea.

Edited by Sophie Davis

A Parliament of Fog is the latest iteration of “Working Together”, a  publishing project that explores relationships and proximity through the lens of artistic practice.

For more than a decade, fog has rematerialised throughout the work of lawyer-turned-artist Layne Waerea. Her public interventions and performances explore what she describes as “legal-social subjectivities,” centering the implications of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as Aotearoa New Zealand’s only living treaty with Māori. For Waerea, the act of chasing fog pursues a physical or ideological space where borders can be tested—“a fertile area where there are lots of question marks”—and where imagination, hope, participation, and failure can be explored.

A Parliament of Fog celebrates ten years of Waerea’s ongoing project the chasing fog club (Est. 2014), and also marks the occasion of its second-ever “Annual General Meeting.” Developed over 2023-24 within a fraught political climate leading up to the New Zealand elections and the first term of a new right-wing coalition government, the publication approaches the club, and Waerea’s recent practice, as a springboard for taking the pulse of the moment. Reflecting on the recent activities of the club in dialogue with a group of collaborators, A Parliament of Fog considers how conditions of opacity, uncertainty, and transition might offer space for collective reimagining.


Designed by Katie Kerr
Published by Working Together Books, 2024
ISBN 978-0-473-72442-9

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Vital Machinery

Featuring contributions by Conor Clarke, Sophie Davis and Lucy Hammonds, Selina Ershadi, Janet Lilo, Louise Menzies and Meg Porteous

Edited by Sophie Davis and Lucy Hammonds


Vital Machinery explores intersections in the practices of five Aotearoa New Zealand women artists working across photography and moving image. Shifting between different perspectives and bodies of work, the exhibition reaches inside the mechanisms at play in looking, recording, and orienting through the camera in our contemporary moment.

This publication documents and departs from an exhibition which was first presented in 2022 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and revisited with the same group of five artists in a further iteration a year later at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery with further commissioned works. Designed by Eva Charlton, it includes a curatorial essay, exhibition documentation, artist’s writing and pageworks.


Designed by Eva Charlton
Published by Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-473-69238-4

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Photography by Stephen Wells.


Working
Together: Nestling Thoughts

Featuring contributions by Bridget Reweti, Louie Zalk-Neale, Nik, Sophie Davis, Sorawit Songsataya and Vera Mey

Edited by Sophie Davis

What relationships and forms of exchange are artists working with today? Nestling Thoughts is the first iteration of an open-ended publishing project that explores this question under the title “Working Together”, considering collaboration, proximity, and contact within creative practice. It aims to embrace new trains of thought that emerge during research and making processes.

This publication departs from a film research project by Sorawit Songsataya that focuses on the relationship between the kōtuku (also known as the white heron, eastern great egret นกยางโทนใหญ่, or Ardea alba modesta) and the Waitangiroto Nature Reserve on the West Coast of Te Waipounamu. It exists within a larger body of work by the artist which explores gravity, meteorology, and flight as forces that bind the human and more-than-human within a time of ecological crisis. Developed in the two years following initial periods of filming at the nesting site at Waitangiroto, Nestling Thoughts extends an atmosphere of enquiry around this process.


Designed by Katie Kerr
Published by Working Together Books, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-473-65945-5
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As needed, as possible

With contributions by Emma Bugden and Chloe Geoghegan, Sophie Davis, Simon Gennard, Sarah Hudson and Zoe Thompson-Moore, Ella Grace McPherson-Newton, Ōtautahi Kōrerotia, Public Share, James Tapsell-Kururangi and Ema Tavola

Edited by Sophie Davis and Simon Gennard

 As needed, as possible is a digital and print publication that emerges from thinking, talking and making around art, labour, and life in contemporary Aotearoa. It questions the role grassroots and art project spaces play within a broader arts ecology and society. Building upon conversations with friends and colleagues, it contributes to a wider field of discussion thinking through the kind of spaces and culture we wish to be working in, and how we might arrive there.


Designed by Katie Kerr
Published by Enjoy and Gloria Books, 2021
ISBN 978-0-473-54359-4
Read on Enjoy websiteSold out





Look out, Fred!: Evangeline Riddiford Graham

With contributions by Sophie Davis, Akil Kirlew, Tim Wagg, and design and typographic treatment by Ella Sutherland


Edited by Sophie Davis and Louise Rutledge

Look out, Fred! revisits Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s exhibition of the same title at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space. Considering the interplay between contemporary myth-making and classical texts, the exhibition interrogated archetypal characters and modes of storytelling. Drawing on an atmospheric and suggestive script, Riddiford Graham worked with two voice actors to develop spoken word audio pieces questioning the relationship between the cowboy ‘Fred’, and his Echo or alter-ego.

The publication, designed by Ella Sutherland, translates this script into a playful typographic score that explores language as material, and blurs distinctions between performance, notation and document. Accompanied with essays by Akil Kirlew and Sophie Davis, Look out, Fred! also includes a newly commissioned photographic series by Tim Wagg, developed in response to the exhibition.


Designed by Ella Sutherland
Published by Enjoy, 2017
ISBN 978-0-473-41549-5Sold out