Mark first met David through his role as Director of Blank Media Collective in 2011 and has gone on to form an ongoing collaboration and relationship to support his practice and career development. We have helped David take risks within the creation of his work, including creating work in remote rural locations for the first time in 2015.
David Ogle’s work is focused upon our relationship to landscape and the fundamental visual forms that we find meaningful or resonant in nature. Ogle aims to refine and distill these elements, creating a heightened sense of nature; imaginary utopias that people can view or temporarily inhabit.
Video transcription
“Hello, my name is David Ogle. I’m an artist based in Liverpool, and I’ve been working with Mark Devereux Projects for around seven years since the organisation started back in 2013. I’ve worked with Mark previously through some exhibition projects at BLANKSPACE, when Mark was running that gallery in Manchester. And when he approached me with this concept for Mark Devereux Projects it felt like a really kind of new way of working with artists that I that I hadn’t seen before. At that time, I just graduated from an MA program and I was really looking for ways to progress my work in new directions and find new opportunities and outlets for creating work and for exhibiting new pieces.
Coming straight out of university, it can be challenging to have a clear sense of direction of how to progress, an art practice. Suddenly you don’t have that kind of continual critical feedback on your work and you don’t have the same kind of access to facilities and resources that you had while studying. So, at that time is incredibly valuable to be working with someone who you can discuss ideas, discuss what’s central and most significant within the work and how that can lead the progression of new ideas. And also working with someone who has these existing long standing relationships with organisations and individuals – potential collaborators that can allow you to imagine the sort of outcomes that you might be able to produce from the work. And new ways of working to help progress, what you’re doing.
So, working with Mark over the past few years, there’s been such a wide range of opportunities opened up through that’s really allowed me to think differently about the potentials of work, what is possible from particular projects, continually trying to to scale up ideas and think really ambitiously about the possibilities of particular ideas. This work has been included in a number of solo exhibitions and other forms of public presentations of work, newly commissioned pieces. Successful applications to grant funding that have allowed for extended periods of research and development, pushing new ideas forward and opening up collaborations. Alongside all this Mark and the team at MDP, have a continual support and guidance on all the other aspects of successful project management and delivery – working with fabricators managing budgets, working on the promotion and marketing of exhibitions and events.
Working as a practicing artist, you’re kind of out on your own, a little bit, but having that kind of support behind you is just fantastic and allows you to feel a little bit more confident and think a little bit more ambitiously in the kind of projects that you might be able to deliver.
And so alongside all these logistical things as well for me but it’s been continually rewarding and so valuable for my work – working with someone over an extended period, and having this relationship – someone who knows the work so well and how ideas have progressed and what the fundamental ambitions of it are. And having someone where if you have an idea that you can just take it to someone and talk about it and really think pragmatically about how this thing might actually be realized.
It’s such a valuable thing to have that kind of ongoing dialogue with someone. And so for artists, particularly those just starting out in their careers I would absolutely recommend working with MDP.”