Julie Davies and Alex Rizkalla: Fruits of Our Labour

Julie Davies and Alex Rizkalla have collaborated over a 20-year period whilst maintaining individual practices and collaborations with others. Their co-authorship developed from the idea of two people working together and the possibility of collaborative projects emerging, in their case it was a sort of fusion; certain circumstances, sustained dialogue and joint research often result in the situation where on completion of a project the authorship was so enmeshed that the work naturally cannot be considered outside of collaboration.

The persistent thread that runs through their work starts with the intersecting interests of art, nature and science but equally valued are the dialogue and methodology—the doing, looking, recording and studying. Davies and Rizkalla have over many years built an iconography of objects in their distinctive ways, but in their collaborative works they subtly shift the emphasis onto the relationships between the process and the product – be it fruit or art – it is the eating and the digesting, the topic and the conversation that the works invite the viewer to be a part of.

— Elvis Richardson, 2017