gerwyn davies' costumes reshape the body in dazzling self-portraits

Gerwyn Davies performs presence through costume design

Gerwyn Davies treats the photographic portrait as a stage for disappearance in his ongoing body of work. The Sydney-based artist engineers elaborately costumed selves that gleam under studio lighting, swell into sculptural proportions, and refuse to reveal a face. What appears at first to be hypervisibility, sequins, vinyl, and candy-colored textiles, becomes a visual barricade. The body inside the costume is present, centered, and performing. Davies redirects the conventional power dynamic of portraiture, where the viewer is granted permission to study a subject, instead granting the subject, himself, full control over how they may or may not be seen.

Phoenix | all images by Gerwyn Davies

From House-Share Experiments to Multidisciplinary Practice

The approach of the photographer and costume maker has been embedded in his practice since before formal training. Davies first picked up a camera in a share house, staging improvised Friday-night fashion shoots with friends, using bedside lamps as lighting, and swapping roles between model, director, and photographer. The images were ‘Vogue magazine on a B horror film budget,’ he recalls, but they revealed the transformative potential of photography, its capacity to fabricate fantasy from ordinary domestic space. That initial playfulness and ready-made sensibility continues to anchor his work today.

Saguaro

The Gloss of Camp and the Disappearing Subject

Gerwyn Davies often assembles costumes from shimmering or slick materials found through instinctive browsing at fabric stores, enveloping and distorting the human form until it becomes unclassifiable. Working blind inside these structures, he steps into frame while the camera fires continuous shots, later sifting through hundreds to find the one frame where the character coheres. Postproduction then ‘massages and manicures’ the image into an intentionally synthetic space, glossy, shallow, and implausible. Depth recedes, surfaces dominate, and viewers are pushed back to the skin of the photograph.

Camp is the engine behind this visual language. For Davies, it is a strategy of excess, incongruity, humor, and seduction. The work dazzles before it destabilizes, drawing in the viewer with spectacle before unsettling them through the absence of face, access, and resolution.

Cola