Still from Les Goddesses, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

“A work, once finished, is ‘like a tombstone,’ ” Moyra Davey writes in her latest book, Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest. Always aware of the inevitable end, she has constructed a practice conscious of its own past and reliant on radical self-doubt. Her photographs, films, and essays cross-reference and depend on one another as she makes a subject of her own process and its intentions, fears, and failures. 

Davey has published twelve artfully designed books that lovers of her work covet for their rarity. This most recent book gathers two essays, “Les Goddesses” (2011) and “Hemlock Forest” (2016), along with photographs and stills from their respective film iterations, in which she is recites her text aloud for the camera, opening it up to the serendipity of mistakes. 

Davey emerged in the eighties, in an art world allergic to the confessional work she was making. Over time, she experienced a “gradual seeping in of a kind of biographical reticence,” until, as she writes, “my subjects constituted little more than the dust on my bookshelves or the view under the bed.” In the Les Goddesses film, she appears not photographing dust but wiping it from her own portfolios in order to reconsider the brassy, sexy photographs she made of her punk teenage sisters in the eighties. She pins the prints to the walls of her apartment where they function as visual footnotes in a monologue dealing with family and disappointment.

Davey often portrays herself in her New York City apartment, within reach of any bookmarked volume in the crosshatched piles on her shelves. Her writing is weighted by reverence for other artists, writers, and filmmakers, whose quotes crowd her paragraphs. “Perhaps I still ‘write’ like a photographer,” she once wrote. “I go out into the world of other people’s writing and take snapshots.” Davey tends to invite her audience in at what feels like the most inopportune moment, when she is surrounded by notes, her rooms in a state of honest disarray, a mess of chairs and dishes piled in the sink. That’s why, as I sat down in her living room for our interview, I felt an uncanny familiarity—everything: the bookcases, the couch, the kitchen, was as I had seen it before—down to her cannonball-like pitbull, Rose, who lay on her back, watching us talk upside down. 

INTERVIEWER

How did these two pieces come together into this book? They were made years apart—Les Goddesses in 2011 and Hemlock Forest in 2016.

DAVEY

After I made Les Goddesses, I spoke about it as a kind of love letter to my family. I tell the story of my sisters and myself when we were debauched teenagers. I draw parallels between my mother and my siblings, and Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters and their “bad behavior” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They got pregnant before marriage, they ran off to France, they lived as free spirits. Bringing the two stories together began with these fabricated coincidences of dates, for instance. My parents getting married exactly two hundred years after Wollstonecraft’s parents, having the same number of children, and coincidences of given names like Claire and Jane. By linking my family stories to the Romantics, I grant them a different kind of valence. Then, two or three years after making Les Goddesses, there was a tragedy. My sister Jane’s youngest daughter, Hannah, overdosed, and I started to rethink the way I had portrayed my siblings and all the drugs and drinking. I began to wonder what would it mean to revisit the story of Les Goddesses, in light of this fatal overdose, and not to show us as cute, fearless punks from the early eighties, but as we are now, visibly scarred women in our fifties and early sixties? What does our reckless behavior mean now, in light of what happened to Hannah?  Read More