Camp, costumes and collaboration – Gerwyn Davies talks about the creativity behind his new exhibition, Shimmer
Shimmer, the dazzling new Artist in Residence exhibition by photographic artist and costume maker Gerwyn Davies, is all about reframing the gaze. Through the transformative power of costume, collaboration and queer creativity, Shimmer allows participants to control how they are seen – or not seen – playfully disrupting conventional portraiture and reframing trans visibility. Before Shimmer makes its debut at Museum of Brisbane on Saturday October 18, we chatted with Gerwyn about the campy cinematic influences that fuel his solo practice, his obsession with materials, and what it meant to surrender control in this joyful and deeply moving collaboration.
To start, we’d love to dig into the formative evolution of your artistic practice and style. What influences would you say have had the biggest impact on the development of your creative voice?
Foremost, any and all acts of camp I can uncover in popular entertainment, cinema, television, advertising. I am an avid consumer of 80s cinema in particular – Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Whoopi Goldberg and Meryl Streep. It goes beyond their hammy performances, through their overwritten scripts, their garish costuming, the overabundance of sets and props, stirring the sensation inside of me to go and make something immediately. There is something profoundly infectious about these productions that, to me, are so riddled with visual, material and performative excess that makes me feel similarly uncontainable and ready to explode into something equally visually dramatic.
Likewise, music is perpetually part of my making process. Selecting fabrics, vigorously sewing, constructing costumes before starting again, lighting, shooting, editing – every moment is soundtracked. I can be parasitic with this music, devouring an artist on repeat while working on a particular image before abandoning them as I move on to the next, meaning particular images (and the characters therein) are anchored to their own songs and sounds.
Beyond these outside sources, I would suggest that materials that I work with – the fabrics and ready-made objects – inspire and compel my work as well. Often, when I’m beginning a new work, I start by mindlessly pacing through the fabric store. I don’t have a specific textile that I’m searching for, but rather scanning until something catches my eye. When I start working with a material to construct a costume, I don’t have a pre-determined form in mind but, rather, almost play with the fabric or object, manipulating it in different ways, testing its resistance and strength, and slowly start to experiment with basic shapes. These basic shapes become like building blocks and the costume then materialises slowly in front of me, like Frankenstein, rather than it being clearly designed on a page beforehand. In this way materials themselves have influenced the development of my work, eliciting that impulse to create.
In addition to photography, costumes and textiles are key parts of your artistic endeavours. Can you share any insight into what drew you to costuming as a mode of expression, and what freedoms or avenues for creativity it offers you?
I think most people can relate to the magic of stepping into a costume. Whether it’s Halloween or a hens party, the process of material transformation has a wonderfully liberating effect. It can make you feel powerful, ridiculous, scary, emboldened or spicy. It’s more than just simply looking different – it can be a total recalibration of how you navigate the world, how you carry yourself and how you engage with the spaces and faces around you.
In the creative works that I make it’s labour-intensive, methodical and slow. I have a long time to meditate on the character that I’m constructing before that ultimate moment of stepping into and moving around in the new form for the camera. Over the last decade or so, I have produced and worn an obscene number of costumes. I’ve shape shifted and slipped between guises and I’ve tried on new forms of varying dimensions, materials and degrees of comfort, and each and every time I still enjoy that empowering sensation of change.
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How do identity, transformation and visibility intersect in your own life, and how has that influenced your artistic and academic practice over time?
I am interested in the nature of portraiture itself and the way these images normally function. When I think about a portrait in its most conventional sense, it is expected to reveal something about the subject to its viewer. The camera in particular is presumed to be an objective tool and even in this ‘post-truth’ age, in which everyone has the means to edit images through user-friendly AI, I believe there is still a small stubborn belief that the camera ‘doesn’t lie’. The camera remains defined by its ability to ‘expose’ and the photographs it produces affords their viewer an opportunity to pore over the details of its subject – to stare unhindered, to interrogate.
There is a lot of power embedded in this photographic transaction – to gaze without restraint – and generally the flow of that power is one-way traffic from viewer toward the subject. I’m interested in perverting these capacities by adopting a deliberate queer approach to the portrait. In my own works, the subject – which is always me – is conspicuous in the frame. The use of elaborate costumes, often fabricated with shimmering and sparkling materials, makes the subject almost hyper-visible. At the same time however, the specifics of the subject are unable to be seen. The face is always obstructed by fabric and the precise dimensions of the figure wildly distort, meaning the subject is impossible to take in fully.
In my photographic artworks, the subject is both there and not there, seen and unseen, and hidden in plain sight. I’m interested in this rearticulation – of the terms of power in the portrait in which the subject is able to determine the conditions of their own in/visibility, controlling the ways in which they are and are not looked upon. Oooft, you can tell I’ve said that a few times before!
You’ll be displaying a series of works at Museum of Brisbane soon as part of Artist in Residency project Shimmer, which also features as part of the Melt Festival program. What are some of the ideas underpinning this project that you were most eager to explore? This project explores both the ideas of visibility and anonymity. How did you and the participants negotiate those dualities in the creation of each portrait?
The only rule of engagement for the project was to produce a costume that would conceal the face. Typically, when we encounter a portrait, the gaze heads straight for the eyes, perhaps before scanning the rest of the face. For the participants, they’re disrupting this process and taking greater control of how the viewer engages with the terms of the portrait. Like a magical act of misdirection, the viewer’s gaze is led over the costume, considering the sculptural character as a whole and left wondering what lies behind these elaborate masks.
This reflects the broader political intentions underpinning this project. In these images, the young people are afforded greater control over their own representations, dictating the terms of their own visibility and determining how and to what extent they can be seen. They are wresting power back through a very playful creative act. There is a paradox alive in these works in which the young people are simultaneously invisible yet hyper-visible, they are hiding in plain sight. Rather than retreat into the shadows and disappear from the world, they are declaring themselves in elaborate, vivid and spectacular ways.
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You worked with a number of participants to design and build transformative costumes for Shimmer. Can you walk us through the workshop process and the collaborative dynamic – how did the participants’ ideas influence the visual outcomes?
This exhibition was produced in collaboration with Open Doors Youth Service, which is marking 25 years of providing essential and life changing support services for queer young people in Queensland. For this project, I worked with a group of trans and gender-diverse young people who are engaged with ODYS to produce this exhibition from start to finish. We use the fundamentals of my own creative practice as a foundation to build from, but the outcomes that you will see at the Museum of Brisbane are predominantly the efforts of the young people themselves.
Over a period of a week, we set up shop inside City Hall with sewing machines, scissors and a mountain of sequin. In a very informal setting, the group began by sketching out ideas for their creations, getting a feel for the available materials before getting underway on building their works. For a lot of participants, they were using sewing machines for the first time and getting their heads around how to problem solve constructing a costume from scratch.
It was really important to me that the participants had total autonomy over their constructions, so I was more of a water boy or a dance mum – enthusiastically running around after them, fetching fabrics and problem solving construction conundrums. When the costumes were complete, the participants stepped inside their creations and performed for the camera. That photographic element was my minor contribution to the whole affair, capturing these characters then manicuring and massaging the images so that they would shimmer and shine.
What did you personally take away from this collaborative process – either creatively or emotionally?
It was extraordinary to be in that environment with the young people as they threw themselves head first in to this weird task devised for them. It was glorious to see them supportively engage with each other, to listen to and share stories – both with each other and with the Open Doors and Museum of Brisbane staff. And giggling – there was a relentless amount of giggling.
Typically, I work in total solitude. I’m a control freak – everything from designing, constructing and wearing the costumes to lighting, shooting and editing the images I do alone. To surrender full control was a daunting experience at first, but watching the process unfold, seeing how these energetic, enthusiastic and sometimes wonderfully strange minds interpret a task that I am so familiar with, was a real pleasure. It was also really wonderful to be a bystander for once and to watch other people undergo the often awkward, uncomfortable, and ridiculous process of getting into a cumbersome costume and shuffling around before the camera. It was really nice that it wasn’t me sweating under lights for once.
How do you see this exhibition contributing to broader conversations about representation and identity in public spaces? Do you have any hopes for how audiences – particularly those outside the wider LGBTIQA+SB communities – engage with this work?
There are a lot of conversations happening about trans and gender diverse people at the moment, from politicians to the pubs, that don’t necessarily include trans voices. I imagine, a lot of the time, people haven’t had an opportunity to engage directly with trans and gender diverse members of the community, to listen to and learn their stories, and to profit off the wisdoms that their particular experiences of navigating the world brings. It’s easier to be dismissive of something when it’s abstract – when it’s not a person seeking the same sense of safety, health and happiness that we all desire. This is that opportunity, a warm welcome into the world of queer young people. Come for the outlandish pictures and stay for the special stories. I’ve grown up through queer communities but producing this exhibition still moved me profoundly. There is always more for all of us to learn, new surprises and delights to encounter beyond our bubble.
This exhibition is an exercise in joy, it celebrates the abundant creativity of these young people, the Queensland queer community at large, and the increasingly vital work that Open Doors Youth Service performs a quarter of a century on from its beginning.
Shimmer: An Artist in Residence project by Gerwyn Davies will be on display at Museum of Brisbane from Saturday October 18, 2025 to Sunday March 8, 2026.