GRASMERE, UK.-Award winning artist Kate Davis has taken inspiration from the Lake District landscape to create a striking exhibition in Grasmere that takes her art outside the confines of the gallery.

On view at the 3°W Gallery at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, headhearthole, relates the Lake District landscape to the human body.

Kate has placed some of her work on the windows of a nearby cottage and has created an installation inside the Wordsworth Trust's boathouse, which also served as her studio.

Drawing on her previous work relating the human anatomy to landscape, Davis has taken her three most significant sites in Grasmere and equated them to the three axes of the body: the head, the heart and the hole. Head is the cottage where Davis has lived during her residency at the Wordsworth Trust: her mental space; the place where she sleeps, thinks, dreams. Poetry written across her living room and bedroom windows highlights the interchange between waking thought and sub-conscious feeling. Heart is the boat-house studio: the place where land meets water; where Town End meets lake; where thought work begins to take physical form. The space is gilded, made precious, and lit and warmed by an open fire. A mirrored boat, designed to hold the artist, supine, waits to be filled and pushed out into the water. Hole is Lower Rydal Cave: the entry point into the earth; the highest altitudinal point of the walk and the lowest of the body; wet, dark and hollow; vaginal and powerful. Here, a latter-day Eros is captured by twilight, shooting his arrow into the mouth of the cave.

The work in 3ºW Gallery invites the viewer into these sites conceptually, leading from head to heart to hole, retracing the artist’s daily walk from cottage to boathouse to cave. The exhibition investigates female sexuality in a male tradition, and how environment influences the human. The combination of built and natural landscapes explores the relationship between the made and the found; the analysed and the intuited. The results are contemporary, but resonate with mythological, classical and Romantic influences, turning the experience of the individual artist into something universal and timeless.

Kate Davis is artist in residence at the Wordsworth Trust. Current exhibitions include Traditional but new, Galerie Binz & Krämer, Köln and drawnapart west, Day and Faber, London. She has recently been commissioned by Modus Operandi and DLR to produce work for Langdon Park Station. Davis has received numerous awards, including the Sydney Water Sculpture Prize, (2002); the Jerwood Drawing Prize (1st prize) in 2001; the SARGANT Fellowship, British School at Rome (1998); Young Artist of the Year, Whitechapel Gallery (1998). She is represented by Fred (London), and is a tutor in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art.

Her next solo show will be at Fred (London), in early 2008. A catalogue published by The Wordsworth Trust will be available at a later date.