Images courtesy of the artists.

Gallery 2

I am not my father

Mitchell Davis, David Horton & Martin John Oldfield

I Am Not My Father is a multigenerational collaboration exploring the complexities of fatherhood. Each artist brings personal experience—ranging from nurturing relationships to those shaped by absence, neglect, or trauma—into a shared conversation through textiles, sculpture, video, and an original score.

The installation examines how contemporary fatherhood is shaped by the legacies of past generations and engages with themes such as masculinity, mental health, neurodiversity, substance use, religion, and shifting family dynamics. Through metaphor, narrative, and abstraction, the artists reflect on what it means to inherit, resist, or redefine the paternal role.

Mitchell Davis uses needlework to reinterpret sentimental objects drawn from his own childhood memories. Recreating these objects gives form to the intangible, forging an uncanny link between past and present. Through this, Davis is able to revisit and reflect on past events — particularly those surrounding his father — now through the lens of his own fatherhood. Within these works, sewing acts as a cathartic process that aids his quest to redefine himself as a man, providing his daughter with a father shaped not by absence, but by intention.

David Horton experiments outside his regular practice to explore the vagaries of fathering two boys in a changing contemporary landscape for young men. Through the prison of a tricky love/hate relationship with his late father, Horton explores the change of learnt patterns via a time-based work using video and song. His father was a carpenter. In the drawer of a table is his fathers eulogy. He endeavours to break the chain of his fathers addictions and unpredictability from his childhood by swimming, which creates space to reflect while maintaining physical and mental health.

Martin John Oldfield’s ‘Rocks in Chair’ construction uses a 1960’s patio fence and steel components to stand in for the suburban loungeroom recliner chair. The chair was a throne in the homes where Oldfield grew up, they were off limits when the father was around. The steel structure is under the load of numerous rocks representing the impossible nature of dynamic family life navigating teenagehood and neurodiversity. The re-defining of family expectations continues regardless of the need to personally reconcile trauma, identity, and the deconstruction of religious beliefs.