Lottie Davies

b. 1971, Guildford, UK

Lottie Davies’ work is concerned with stories and personal histories, the tales and myths we use to structure our lives: memories, life-stories, beliefs. She takes inspiration from classical and modern painting, cinema and theatre as well as the imaginary worlds of literature. She employs a deliberate reworking of our visual vocabulary, playing on notions of nostalgia, visual conventions and subconscious ‘looking habits’, with the intention of evoking a sense of recognition, narrative and movement.

Davies was born in Guildford, UK, in 1971. After a degree in Moral Philosophy, Logic & Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she moved back to England and has since been based in London and then Cornwall as a photographer, artist and writer. She is regularly invited to speak about her work internationally and throughout UK, in galleries and institutions as well as universities and colleges. Davies is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Lecturer at the Institute of Photography at Falmouth University in Cornwall.

Lottie Davies has won recognition in numerous awards, including the Association of Photographers’ Awards, the International Color Awards, and the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Awards. Her work has garnered international acclaim; Quints (‘Memories and Nightmares’) won First Prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Viola As Twins won the Photographic Arte Laguna Prize in Venice in 2011, and she won the Young Masters Art Prize in 2012. Her seven-year long project Quinn was widely exhibited across the UK and subsequently published in a limited-edition monograph of the same name in 2021.

Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, described Davies’ work as “brilliantly imaginative”.