Glasfryn Project

Editor’s Note: We asked David Rees Davies to send some pictures and what we got back was a stream of images which arrived, in fact, as a torrent in the Inbox, overwhelming the system completely. What you see here, arranged in a long column of rectangles of various aspects and sizes, reflects, though, on the whole, not so much the disorder in which the pictures arrived, but the disorder in which they ended up in a folder on the desktop after many kinds of struggle with downloading and formatting. The arrangement itself, then, is without obvious significance, but one of the ways I personally have enjoyed reading it is as a kind of mutilated visual essay (I might have said ‘meditation’, but the noun doesn’t sit at all well with my sense of this artist’s hyperactively playful, paratactical and irreverent personality); a frgamented essay, then, around the themes, let’s say, of the Human in Nature, Nature in the Human, the Inhuman in the Human, the Unnatural in the Natural? This strategy relates to certain aspects of what I feel this very wide-ranging but very environmentally aware and concerned practitioner is up to, and, as far as I can make out, the man himself doesn’t disagree. You might see your own kind of story, or no story at all, as I do and don’t. Anyway, this is just a taster of this prolific artist’s oeuvre. To see a great deal more, click on the link at the bottom of the page.                            

 

 

 

 

 

David Rees Davies works in a variety of media and has exhibited in solo and group shows in UK and Europe, most recently at the Welsh National Eisteddfods in Llandow,Wrexham, Bala and Cardiff; Welsh Artist of the Year 2012; ‘Rhondda Grey?’ at the Rhondda Heritage Centre, South Wales; “The Swear Box, The Falling Pilot & The Avenging Hare” in London 2011; the Jerwood Drawing Prize (UK touring) 2007/9; ‘Nature Morte’ at the Kharkov City Gallery, Ukraine 2009 and “Handshakes & Earthquakes” at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, London, paintings and drawings were exhibited at the Dinefwr Literary Festival, Carmarthen, West Wales. An essay name-checking people such as Edward Lear, Polish film director Zbigniew Rybczynski of ‘Tango’ fame, Cliff Thorburn, JPR Williams, Raymond Queneau etc. with accompanying site-specific photographs celebrating a much loved stretch of Glamorganshire coastline were published in August by Planet, The Welsh Internationalist Magazine. [see News for TLS review] Two new works have been chosen for the East Sussex Open Competition, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, this summer. Works are in the collections of the Scottish Arts Council, Kharkov City Art Gallery, Norwich City Museum, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Kings College, Cambridge. Commissions include Private Eye Magazine, Penguin, Picador, Methuen, Sunday Times, New York Times and Boston Globe. Publisher of limited edition publications: Tasmania Freehand Press, since 1998. Recent articles include Welsh magazine Taliesin with accompanying poem by Eisteddfod poet-in-residence. Awarded British Council Bursaries in 1990 to travel and study as artist in residence at the Soviet Union of Artists’ Studios in Moscow, Leningrad, Uzbekistan and in 1998 for a one-man show in Kharkov, Ukraine. Artist in Residence at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia, 1998. Awarded first prize, Fine Art International Open Print Biennale -‘4th Block Chernobyl Memorial’. Graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1979 and has taught part-time in many of leading UK art schools including, currently, Kingston University, London. Lives and works in East Sussex. To see a great deal more of David Rees Davies’ work click here: davidreesdavies.com/

View all: Issue 6, Junction Box | Posted on 22 Jul 2014 |