IMG 6970-001-Head

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex.

In the late 1990s John Davies introduced monumental heads to his practice. For Davies, the development of this extreme scale provides new opportunities to explore how the human figure may be perceived and how one can relate to it differently. The minute figures within the monumental heads are intensely detailed and so endow the viewer with authority, as the figures are inspected. The large heads, with no less detail in their surface, reduce the viewer to a Lilliputian scale. John Davies spent much of the mid nineties working on a group of large heads, including Big Head, in an attempt to explore this subject further. Davies became interested in forcing a physical relationship with these works—in the way that two or three of these monumental heads, when placed close together would insist that viewers would have to squeeze between them. This action essentially proffers the sensation of being in a crowd or standing adjacent to large boulder standing stones.