Artist Bio

David Sowerby

I am an Anglo Armenian artist born in Iran,  and based in Leeds, West Yorkshire in the UK. I graduated from Coventry University, studying BA Fine Art in 1995 and then an MA in Creative Curating at Goldsmiths College,  London  in 1998.

 “My current practice is part of a contextually centred sculptural process that has been developing since 2011 but can be traced in its expanded conceptual concerns for far longer. I first showed works from this project in Sept of 2017 in a solo exhibition :- 'The idles that habit forms', at 'The Project Space', University of Leeds, Fine Art Building and have since presented a solo exhibition at StudionAme, Leicester in early March 2019, entitled 'Casements for chemistry', A solo show at Blank_ Leeds in feb 2020 entitled ‘a makeshift flesh’ and a solo exhibition at the Florence trust, London in oct 2020 entitled ‘corpus variations’. In 2021 I was selected as 1 of 4 associate artists at the tetley gallery in leeds, where I showcased new work in april 2022.

My practice strives to amplify a bodily experience. I construct surrogate bodies as hollow vessels; exterior shells made from a mixture of collected materials that I regard to be seasoned with circumstantial traces or contextual associations.    

Material emphasis is at the very centre of my practice and I try to remain responsive to it.  rather than always working toward a premeditated design,  the Themes of the individual works emerge through the process of my interaction with the materials, guided by a mixture of intuition, context and circumstance.

On an almost daily basis I collect discarded material. This stuff is generally of two sources; either it is found during everyday activities as dumped items, or it is waste product kept from my employment in an art school.    

These cast-off physical ‘traces’ are the relics of my labour,  interactions and locality, captured stretches of my experiences coalesced in to fuzzy invocations of idolatry,  life forms, the apparatus and more.