David Sowerby

Thursday 27 February - Friday 7 May 2020

An Anglo Armenian artist born in Iran, David Sowerby is based in Leeds. He graduated from Coventry University, studying BA Fine Art in 1995 and then an MA in Creative Curating at Goldsmiths College, London in 1998. His many roles within the field of contemporary art range from curating, gallery administration, exhibition installation and public liaison. He currently instructs students as an Artist Technician in the 'production' and presentation of 3D based works at Leeds University, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.  

“I am a visual artist, taking material influence from my context and the technology I encounter; I make works that begin and end with the body, seasoned with an existential narrative.

My work strives to connect and project my contextual experience through the matter and forms I use in my productions. For some time now my routines and employment have supplied my practice with a daily sampling of discarded 'waste' material that is my data set, I treasure and re-purpose this stuff, regarding it with the imagined and physical traces of my locality, exertions and interactions.

I coalesce and layer circumstantial structures; my subjective spectrum of aesthetics and existential concerns shift my approach through the making, the forms are not purely designed, their formal qualities are products of the elements combined, captured stretches of my experiences that are mapped with the matter that I interact with. Process is employed as a meter which I hope resonates through my work as a structural rhythm and visual lure. This engagement with habitual process is directed and developed to create casements, interiors of space surrounded by an exterior shell or skin, inevitably a bodily aspect and physicality is hinted at which binds my works. In the individuals there are fuzzy invocations of idolatry, the life form, the apparatus; the perceptively familiar in one moment, becomes unfamiliar in the next. An allusion to an underlying processing nature speaks of life and its labours. One of the central themes and motifs in my practice is the suggestion of an alimentary process, this is a key formal anchor that I revolve around. I am bound to this as a conceptual and visual underpinning, it frames any subsequent narrative with an emphatic existential premise.

The filtering tube recurs and whether the viewer interprets the titles, regards my works as physiology, machines / sensory devices, conduits of idolatry, or even as purely self descriptive renderings of my kin-aesthetic questioning; my aim is to leave no doubt that what is in front of them appears to require stimulus, fuel, offerings or lured attention.”