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 Kefford’s work explores his immediate, local ecology through transforming un-loved, thrown-away objects rescued from the environment. His trans-disciplinary practice is research driven and builds relationships between marginal communities and situated sites often on the precipice of change or undergoing transformation.
Working with synthetic materials and (non)bio-degradable stuff he transforms abandoned materials into something other - unknown entities – unanchored from their original environment, beyond human, mutant-like and mutable. His characterful sculptures engender a form of empathy with the non-human, suggesting all things have ‘souls and agency’ and seem to speculate that if the world is transforming into an inhospitable rubbish dump, then evolving life-forms will need to adapt by mimicking waste and bodily incorporating detritus. A cyclical form of activism, which he describes as ”creative composting”.
For Kefford there exists a Queer Ecology to these agglomerations, a form of world-building seen through the lens of the ruptured and fragmented, seemingly disposed of and forgotten things - the afterlife of stuff in the all-consuming Anthropocene, that embrace the uncertainty of a changing world.