BIOGRAPHY
David Kefford is a multidisciplinary artist based in Cambridge, UK. His work has been widely exhibited and commissioned across the UK and internationally, in solo and group exhibitions, biennials, festivals, and public art contexts.
He is the recipient of several awards and grants, including the Develop Your Creative Practice Grant from 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 work is represented in public and private collections.
David is currently Senior Lecturer within 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) Correspondance Course. He is also co-founder and director of artist-led project Aid & Abet.
ARTIST STATEMENT
David Kefford’s research-led practice explores queer ecologies, material agency, and cyclical transformation through sculptural processes situated in local environments and lived experiences.
Working with found, salvaged, and decomposing materials, Kefford transforms abandoned objects into speculative sculptural forms - mutant, beyond-human entities that blur the line between waste, the forgotten, and regenerative life. These works suggest that if we are becoming inseparable from our environmental detritus, then new hybrid forms may emerge through creative composting - a methodology that reflects seasonal cycles of making, unmaking, and remaking.
His installations have historically occupied indoor gallery spaces, but through his current research, his practice has expanded into outdoor environments, a new direction shaped by ecological engagement and site-responsiveness. These works often inhabit liminal or in-between spaces and are assembled using non-linear, seasonally inspired processes, engaging with material decay, repair, and adaptation. The sculptures operate as empathic entities, hosting entangled more-than-human relationships, and embracing the ephemeral, the unstable, and the discarded - a response to the uncertainty and fragmentation of the Anthropocene.
Through this lens, Kefford’s work proposes a queer ecological practice, an ongoing, fragmented world-building process responding to shifting environmental, social, and psychological spaces.