Events
Events, exhibitions and current creative projects.
Exhibition
A time and place
22/02/2025
OVADA
Oxford
OX1 1NJ
Highlights from Davids' solo exhibition at OVADA in Febrary 2025, that accompanied a workshop of the same name. The exhibition of new works included landscapes, abstracts, assemblage, installation and sketchbooks with photos documenting walking site visits. The works were completed as part of David’s final major project for an MA [online] with Falmouth University.
What began for David as a creative experiment processing unconscious material, evolved into a framework for his emerging practice and a way of engaging with memory, place, time and affect.
David explored this process through several projects and distilled it down into three specific approaches: documented walking responding to memory, affect and chance, ‘affective mapping’ and ‘spontaneous poetry’. His eclectic practice also embraces drawing, painting and collecting found objects, to form assemblages.
A Time and Place was inspired by an archive of family photos dating back to the 1800's. David visited sites along the Northeastern coast where his family originated, before returning to the studio to create numerous works reflecting the nuanced, layered experiences, interweaving myth, memory and meaning. The spontaneous poem ‘Green North Yorkshire’ references places, landscapes, lives and events – his great uncle, Ralph Hodgson, author of ‘The Last Blackbird’, landmarks like Old Nab and Roseberry Topping, the jet and ironstone found on the northern Jurassic coast.
As David explored the forms and relationships of found objects, reflections on the intersections of time, place and affect brought him to view his experience through the lens of the psychologist, Donald Winnicott’s theory of ‘potential space’, as a model for the ongoing creative process, explored through some of the final works in the exhibition.
David looking at his sketchbooks. Photograph: Dameion Ridgeway 2025.
Spontaneous poem
Green North Yorkshire
Here in Green
North Yorkshire Hestia calls me
To the Terracotta cream honey’d homes.
Unconscious roots from Eastern Skies
Where fertile Demeter
Breathes wild-garlic contraband,
Blackthorn, Gorse and Hawthorn White.
At Runswick, Shrill gulls rise and fall
to wild oceans,
While North-Seas wash
Jurassic Eastern Kettleness.
Hodgson
Blakey
Violet-May,
Rising Skylarks steeply singing
Over Roseberry Topping
While George, Anne and James Reed’s Flocks
Plough colder ferrous blood-stone land.
Near Hinderwell
The Restless Lapwings tumbling flight
Furrows hazy blue.
And Ralph’s Blackbirds
Sing vivid recollections
While bickering Crows
Fly home
to St Hilda’s darkening Holy Well.
Downloadable work-sheets