From Psychology to Paint: Joyce Davies Opens Personal Exhibition
Self-taught artist processes trauma after decades helping young people do the same.
Joyce Davies spent decades as a Clinical Child Psychologist, working with young people across Scotland, Liverpool and London. Now she’s turned that lens inward. Her exhibition “Wha Kens It Feels It” opens on 23 October at Outer Spaces, showing work that deals with her own childhood trauma rather than helping others process theirs.
The Scots language title translates roughly as “who knows it feels it.” It’s a phrase about lived experience, about understanding through feeling rather than observation. Davies is self-taught as a visual artist, having begun painting and drawing in 2019 after her years in clinical practice.
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Making sense through colour
The work is expressive and personal, created as part of her own journey towards healing. People appear throughout her paintings, rendered in bold colours and distinctive forms that sit between representation and abstraction. She also works with geometric patterns, using shape and colour to explore emotion and meaning. Music plays in her studio while she works, influencing what emerges on canvas.
Davies lives on the Shetland Islands with her family but has been working on this exhibition at Outer Spaces in Shiprow. The venue has given her studio space to develop the work over recent months.
Opening week
The exhibition sits within the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, opening on its first day. Davies’ background makes this more than a thematic fit. Her faith informs her activism around social justice and workplace safety, and she volunteers with health charities. That sense of social conscience runs through her creative practice too.
The exhibition runs until Thursday 20 November, with an opening event tomorrow evening (Thursday 23rd October) from 6pm to 8pm. The gallery is open Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, 11am to 4pm, or you can arrange a private viewing by contacting Davies directly. Entry is free.
For someone who spent a career helping others make sense of difficult experiences, making this work public feels like a different kind of threshold.
