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 and reliquaries of my labour,  interactions and locality, captured stretches of my experiences coalesced in to fuzzy invocations of idolatry,  life forms, the apparatus and more.