David Kefford

After a short break, we're pleased to return with our next Mixing It Up online feature. This month we're proud to introduce you to the work and practice of artist David Kefford, who shares the first piece of artwork he remembers making, his top advice for all artists and who he would most like to collaborate with.

Further information

David's practice centres around an expanded sculptural framework. Themes, including queer ecology and object relations are imaginatively explored through low-tech, hands-on making processes against a backdrop of a consumer ‘waste’ society.

His starting point involves collecting, re-mixing, subverting and transforming under-valued and un-loved (discarded/fragmented) objects, materials and images which he liberates from the local environment – artificial things, non-bio-degradable stuff such as plastic. Once accumulated, these materials are then transformed through a time-based, durational and fluid process in his studio to portray hybrid, biomorphic assemblages, which embody feelings of difference and strangeness. The studio becomes a generative space for the construction and accumulation of these things. More recently he has also been working across digital spaces, media space or the space between bodies and events for production and presentation to push boundaries of sculptural practice through touch screens, haptic dimensions and recorded gestures including glitch and human error as transformative identities.

Kefford’s work deals with feelings of social disturbance and queer possibility, a merging of multiple narratives in which fact and fiction, intersect - a diverse cultural archaeology of fragmented future artifacts or future-oriented world-building.

David Kefford is a multi-disciplinary artist. He lives and works in Cambridge, UK. He completed his MA in Fine Art at University of Brighton in 1999 and is alumni of Wysing Arts Centre.  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 also co-founder and director of artist led project  Aid & Abet.