NEWS 

Jan 2019

Fog Fair San Francisco with Sarah Myerscough Gallery

Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Sunday, January 19, 2020

Looking forward to showing new work made with David Gates Furniture at Fog Fair with Sarah Myerscough Gallery.

David Gates and Helen Carnac are both drawn to industrial architecture and agricultural infrastructure. Their riverside studio is close to the remaining Thames-side industries, including storage depots, jetties and wharves, grain silos, coastal defences, radio towers, pylons, and conveyors of the Tate; Lyle factory. The artists find a peculiar rightness to many of these structures related to their expediency, function, and immediacy. The buildings’ rationality and utility generate a sculptural and aesthetic integrity. None of Gates and Carnac’s cabinets are ‘of’ a particular structure or building although some are more strongly related to particular sites. However, they all embrace an overall aesthetic and approach that emerges from observation, photography, and drawing.⠀

Images : Elevator I, 2019. Ash, steamed pear, sycamore, vitreous enamel on mild steel. 47 H x 16 W x 15 D inches. Photo credit : David Gates.

November 2019

Maker in Residence, Institute of Making, UCL, London

I have been working as artist in Residence at UCL and continue to do so, watch this space for more information to follow.

Images: Institute of Making

Sept 2019

Lovely film of a walk that I planned the walk and took part in with Judith Wehmeyer Vd Boom and Fabrizio Cocchiarella - UFO Collaboratory back in September 2019. The Drift ‘In search of Practice’ was organized by UFƟ Collaboratory, and took place during the London Design Festival 2019. The Collaboratory invited practitioners from NL/UK to share presentations that explore design practice and new dimensional thinking, while drifting as group through the urban landscape. The conversations were formed in order to re-think the process of design practice and establish parameters that explore alternative ways of making and dialogue. The practice of drifting is a nomadic context and engine for applied and philosophical thinking and one of the foundations of the UFƟ Collaboratory. With the support of ArtEZ University of the Arts and Manchester School of Art. Filmed and edited by Pier Giorgio Provenzano - ididthisfilm.com

August 2019

Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset

‘David Gates: in dialogue’: an exploration of containment, materiality, and the desire to collect, assemble, order and display.

Images Dave Watts

Sightlines

Saturday 4 May – Sunday 2 June

‘Sightlines’ as an idea began in 2009 when both David Gates and Matthew Harris, took part in the touring exhibition ‘Taking Time, Craft and the Slow Revolution’ which was co curated by Helen Carnac. Throughout the intervening years all three artists have looked at ways in which the dialogue and routes of enquiry opened up by the show could be developed further, and how the questions it posed might form the starting point for further investigation.

Each of the artists in this exhibition share a concern for the way in which ideas, images and objects evolve through a process of building and construction. A process of addition and subtraction, where the building up and paring away of layered material both reveals and conceals a rich language of contingent mark and embedded colour - a concern also for the way in which objects are held together through a utilitarian language of joints and fixings which reveal something of the history of their making.   

At the vital heart of the project is the experience of looking, seeing and making. In particular, the way in which the spaces, voids and holes prevalent in much of the three-dimensional work direct sight lines and viewpoints through the gallery space, to crop and frame new views of other works both two and three-dimensional. The resulting visual juxtapositions brought about by this looking through, will lead to a conjoining of object, material and process, whilst revealing new and unexpected arrangements and compositions.

Private View Friday 3 May, 6pm – 8pm

Linked Event: Saturday 11 May | 2pm | Free | Sightlines - In Conversation

An informal gallery talk and conversation with David Gates and Matthew Harris, chaired by Paul Harper. A chance to meet the artists and hear more about the work on display in the ‘Sightlines’ exhibition.

Artist Matthew Harris will be ‘in residence’ on the weekends of 11 & 12 May and 18 & 19 May. The gallery will be open from 11am to 6pm on these days as part of the Select Art Trail. For full details see www.sitselect.org