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 serves to amplify a bodily experience, my builds are as surrogates, hollow vessels with skins made from waste materials that are scattered around and generated by my life and it’s labours. Discounted from usefulness and discarded, this stuff represents for me the trace elements of my body’s exertions, in it I find material legitimacy and potency for my task. the resulting composites are reliquaries constructed from their relics; captured stretches of my experiences and actions coalesced into fuzzy invocations.

For some time now I have worked as a technician at an art school, supporting student studies by fabricating a regular and changing array of timber-based structures as well as guiding and advising students with professional practice and perspectives of a ‘critical process’.  

I keep offcuts from my shifts, as well as spent panels from studio walls, plinths and my workshop activity, these ready-made, or rather ‘labour-made’ elements have both traceable and notional echoes of my days, I use them, partly as a kind of data set and partly as a pseudo shamanistic channeling. Beating time with a meter of repetitious process, I work sympathetically and systematically in batches, bonding one element to the other and giving existing structures the lead to progress.  material and process are cycled again and again and again until, through this kinaesthetic narrative I find focus for my bodily dialogues and the Themes of the individual works emerge