His designs perfectly resonate with the local culture and climate. He takes his ideas from his surroundings and puts them on fabric, not canvas. The prints — inspired by stones and sand, surrounded and filled up by water — adorn the finest of silk fabrics in Nathan Ross Davis’s designs.
In the summer heat of Doha, any woman with a fine taste would definitely want to wear a scarf made out of such designs. Davis, a faculty member of Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar (VCUQatar) is showcasing the ‘Geo Desert Pool’ silk prints at the Strange Wonders exhibition by the university at Msheireb Museums.
“The series of collages is a study of wonder and beauty found in my everyday expat life in Doha — a glorification of the local and banal from my privileged, situated, suburban viewpoint,” says Davis, explaining his inspiration behind the digital collages made with inkjet on silk.
Davis’s ideas for the designs come from a combination of his observation and study of the “spaces he inhabits and the spaces he interacts with.
Davis tends to collect things wherever he lives. Here, he has been scavenging around for rocks and photographing them.
“I had an animation of a bunch of rocks from a construction site from near my house. I take some of that stuff, use the 3D scanner and by looking at the geometry and those kinds of materials, I make things,” says Davis, in an interview with Community.
“And you combine that visual research alongside the fact that I swim every day with my kids here when it is snowing back in Montana,” he adds. And from this combination comes his idea for silk prints.
Davis’s silk prints, on display at Strange Wonder, are in fact prototypes though, not ready-to-go products. They are commercially viable as they can be acid dyed and the artist believes a lot of companies have been doing it. The digital printing silk is durable. It was his first experiment with the medium and he says printing on fabric is fun.
After studying sculpture at Oregon State, Nathan earned an MFA in Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Nathan began teaching at Ohio University and then Montana State University before coming to VCUQatar. He taught graphic design for five years, teaching courses in digital media, identity, typography, publication design, design principles and an interdisciplinary seminar called Landscape/Mediascape.
Nathan currently teaches Surface Research in the Art Foundation programme at VCUQatar. After studying sculpture at Oregon State, Nathan earned an MFA in Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Nathan also served as the Graduate Studies committee chair at Montana State, where he taught a graduate seminar on media and identity, and served on several MFA thesis committees.
In addition to his activity as a researcher and design educator, Nathan continues to maintain a professional practice through Arcadian Studio, a design studio and consultancy with his partner Jennifer Davis. Nathan’s design work has appeared in Print Magazine, Graphis, Under Consideration’s FPO Awards, Design Boom and Creative Quarterly.