Tilly Davey has extensive experience designing and implementing collaborative community art projects that give people with disabilities access to arts opportunities. She consistently strives to bring community and outsider art into mainstream gallery spaces with the intention of encouraging creative dialogue between different sectors of the arts.
Tilly’s independent practice explores diverse expressions of human vulnerability and the many ways in which people encounter and confront daily struggles. Her work often explores the repercussions of inequitable power structures upon certain groups within the broader community. She works across a broad scope of mediums to produce both abstract and figurative works which commonly represent discombobulated forms of the human figure in various landscapes.
The work Tilly produces and the programs she directs seek to prompt reflection on the need to break down barriers between people working in different sectors of society, so that diversity is celebrated not only conceptually, but as a practical and organisational methodology.
Established in 2021, the National Emerging Art Prize was created to provide an annual, highly visible national platform to identify, promote and support the most promising emerging visual and ceramic artists in Australia.