Biography
David Kefford is a multi-disciplinary artist. He lives and works in Cambridge, UK. His work has been extensively exhibited and commissioned in the UK and internationally in both Solo and Group exhibitions alongside inclusion in Biennials, Festivals and Public Art contexts.
Kefford has been awarded numerous Grants and Awards, including a recent Develop Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England, a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, an Escalator Visual Arts Award and the Roy Noakes Bursary Prize at the Royal British Society of Sculptors. His work is held in a number of Public and Private collections.
He is currently Senior Lecturer on the BA Fine Art programme at University of Hertfordshire and is a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS).
He is also co-founder and director of artist led project Aid & Abet.
Statement
David's practice centres around an expanded sculptural framework with his own body as the pivot. Themes such as queer ecology, new materialism and object relations are imaginatively explored through low-tech, self sustaining, hands-on making processes against a backdrop of a consumer ‘waste’ society.
His starting point involves collecting, re-mixing, subverting and transforming under-valued and un-loved (discarded/fragmented) objects, materials and images which he liberates from the local environment – synthetic materials, non-bio-degradable stuff (such as plastic) that will remain after our individual human lives as relic scraps on the earth or in the sea. Non-human or non-organic things have ‘souls’, connecting to animist beliefs and relating to human presence, acknowledging we are living in the Anthropocene.
Once accumulated, these materials are then ‘queered up’ through a time-based, durational and fluid process in his physical studio to portray hybrid, biomorphic assemblages, which embody feelings of difference and strangeness. The studio becomes a generative space for the construction and accumulation of non-binary companion forms.
More recently he has also been working across digital spaces, media space or the space between bodies and events for production and presentation to push boundaries of sculptural practice through touch screens, haptic dimensions and recorded gestures including glitch and human error as transformative identities.
Kefford’s work deals with feelings of environmental disturbance and queer possibility, a merging of multiple narratives in a more-than-human-world. His physical and virtual studios become a diverse cultural archeology of fragmented future artifacts or future-oriented world-building.