BIOGRAPHY
David Kefford is a multidisciplinary artist based in Cambridge, UK. His practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, moving image, AR and site-responsive work, and has been widely exhibited across the UK and internationally in galleries, museums, biennials, festivals, and public art contexts. His work is represented in both private and public collections.
Kefford is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including Firstsite Collectors’ Group Bursary, Arts Council England, a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, the Escalator Visual Arts Award, and the Roy Noakes Bursary Prize from the Royal British Society of Sculptors. His practice has been the subject of independent critical writing in Art Monthly, a-n, Varsity, and exhibition catalogue essays, as well as peer-reviewed academic discussion in journals such as JoTTER. His work has also been featured in BBC News and ITV regional media coverage, reflecting its broader cultural visibility and public engagement.
Across these contexts, Kefford’s work has been positioned within debates on material transformation, ecological thinking, assemblage methodologies, and contemporary sculptural processes.
He is Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS), and a mentor on the Turps (MASS) Correspondence Course. Kefford is also co-founder and director of Aid & Abet, an artist-led initiative dedicated to experimental practice, collaboration, and critical dialogue.
ARTIST STATEMENT
David Kefford’s sculptural practice is material-led, process-driven, and centrd around ecological, queer, and posthumanist thinking. His works emerge through improvisation, responsiveness, and sustained engagement with materials, rather than from predetermined or fixed starting points. Found, salvaged, and pre-owned objects form the skeletal frameowrk of each sculpture—sourced from local environments, charity shops, second-hand economies, and sites of abandonment. Carrying their own histories, traumas, and prior uses, these materials are approached as active agents within the making process.
Construction methods are intentionally low-tech, incorporating DIY assemblage and makeshift repair over precision fabrication. Making becomes a bodily, tactile, and intuitive process shaped by exploratory experiments and material agency. Through these open-ended methods, the sculptures evolve as hybrid, otherworldly entities that occupy ambiguous positions between human, animal, object, and environment.
Increasingly, Kefford’s research has moved outdoors, where sculptures are exposed to weather, seasonal cycles, and more-than-human relations. In this context, the garden operates as a living laboratory—a heterotopic space in which the works continue to transform through co-creation with environmental forces. The sculptures remain in flux, enduring and adapting as weather, time, and ecological interaction alter their surfaces, structures, and behaviours.
Kefford’s practice reflects wider concerns with material agency, ecological entanglement, queer ecology, and regenerative or circular making. By working with what is immediately available, economically, environmentally, and socially, the practice foregrounds acts of improvisation, making-do, and creative composting, proposing sculptural processes that evolve in relation with the world rather than in opposition to it.