Phoebe Davies’ film The Sprawl and collectable limited edition print Flex both resulted from Davies’s interactions with young female wrestlers and staff at Oslo’s Kolboltn and Lambersæter wrestling clubs in Oslo. In these projects, Davies’s lens studies the club members’ physical enactment of relationships of acceptance, support, tenderness, joy, fear, aggression and transformation, within the environment of a club designed for physical training towards socially licensed combat. Female wrestling has an established history, but the sport is far from mainstream: in Davies’s work we hear one of the coaches explaining that when she first competed internationally, she and her peers wore men’s wrestling suits with t-shirts because female-specific suits didn’t exist. Davies’ moving presentation of a new generation of female wrestlers in training highlights their challenge to traditional gender norms, their parallel development of physical strength and mental resilience, and their growing confidence in their individual physical and psychological presence. Sports training emerges as an education in how to live a fuller life. 

Limited Edition Artist Print Now On Sale

Flex is created by artist Phoebe Davies from work she carried out with young athletes at Kolboltn and Lambertseter Wrestling Clubs in Oslo during the residency, Taking Hold - The Double Bridge. It is part of a body of work that spans video, sound and print to explore tactility, training, competition and solidarity as expressed in contact sport. This body of work went on to be shown at a major solo exhibition, Points of Rupture at Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK.

Flex
Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth 305gsm paper
30.48 x 45.72 cm
Signed edition of 25 + 3 APs
Unframed

850 NOK