The Notice Board is proud to be able to share Joyce Davis 60° North exhibition. Joyce lives with complex physical, psychological, and neurological illness which is helped considerably by making art. This making, The Notice Board believes, offers Joyce a type of freedom. A freedom that is available to all of us if we care to embrace it. It’s a space where we can reflect on our pasts, presents, and even imagine a future. A place to manage feelings and share ideas.
Joyce says: For me Art is therapy. I think it found me. I know I needed it. The works that I’m showing here are part of this therapy. They are a variety of prints (Mono, Intaglio and Riso) and drawings in pen. All of them are faces that you may recognise as familiar to you, but they are of people I have known personally or at a distance. I live 60° North of the equator, but the world is accessible to me from my Shetland home.
People make places but one thing I truly believe is that we all share much more than we are different. We all experience love and joy, pain and hurt. We all feel safety and fear. We can all reach out and change other people’s lives for the better or the worse. I want my art to reach people and to give them an opportunity to reflect, to pause and to feel – a moment of escape from the stresses of their lives, a gift from me from 60° North.
Joyce firstly trained as a nurse working with people with learning disabilities and then in mental health. She went on to further study and completed a Masters in Psychology at the University of Glasgow and followed this with a Post Graduate Masters in Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Joyce worked in the NHS in both England and Scotland as a Clinical Psychologist and was Head of a number of Clinical Child Psychology Departments.
Illness meant an end to Joyce’s career, and she began to make art and to write creatively through initially going to well-being classes at Shetland Arts. Her career as an artist developed into print making and she has found a whole new world has opened up to her. Joyce has enjoyed an art residency at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen and has shown her work both in the UK and in the US. She has been awarded a number of Artist Bursary’s and currently has a Solo Exhibition at the Mareel in Lerwick. (www.shetlandarts.org) Blogs written by Joyce are on the Shetland Arts website. Joyce is represented by www.jenniferlaurengallery.com Instgram: @joycedaviesart