Born in Philadelphia, Davis attended Davidson College and Vanderbilt University. After graduating in 1967, he went to England to pursue a degree in English Literature.  There he found his love for clay.  After working with language for so long, I found that working with visual material and my hands was a great relief.  From there he pursued a degree in visual studies at Clemson University.  Among his recognitions are grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and two from the South Carolin Arts Commission.  His works are included in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Columbia Museum in South Carolina, and the U.S. Embassy Collection in Ottawa, Canada.

 

The Transformation of Clay - Exhibited for the first time together, these three formats - pots, freestanding sculpture, and wall pieces - move freely in and out of each other, influencing and echoing.  For a long time I've had a fascination with depicting changes in natural scale from the very small, such as cells and diatoms, to the unimaginably large, the galaxies.  Verified and witnessed by scientific instruments like the electron microscope and the Hubble telescope, each extreme of real phenomena bears strong structural, even artistic, resemblances, and I am awed that such natural solutions recur time and again.  These extremes evolved, choosing elegant structures through time in response to different stimuli, curious and beautiful.  And like natural solutions, artistic ones keep being born.  Here in the upstate, thanks to Hampton III Gallery, I am able to exhibit clay's astonishing ability to transform itself into an unending stream of plastic forms and feelings.

-Jamie Davis, February 2005

 

Gallery Exhibition -Clay Pots

Gallery Exhibition - Sculpture