In Search of a Higher Shelf, a solo exhibition by David Kefford, is the inaugural project at Quip and Curiosity, a new contemporary art space in Cambridge city centre.
Kefford has been in residence over the summer to experiment with methods of displaying a collection of recent sculptures made in response to the unique architecture and history of the space. Referring to notions of daily routines and impossible dreams, In Search of a Higher Shelf is an energetic and psychologically charged immersive environment incorporating a gathering of assemblages that embody his own personal materialism.
Kefford’s practice centres around an expanded sculptural framework with his body as the pivot. Themes such as queer ecology and object relations are imaginatively explored through low-tech, hands-on processes against a consumer waste society. Kefford’s starting point involves collecting, re-mixing, subverting and transforming under-valued and discarded objects, materials and images which he liberates from the local environment. Once accumulated, these are then ‘queered up’ through a time-based, durational and fluid process to portray hybrid, biomorphic assemblages which embody feelings of difference and strangeness. The studio becomes a generative space for the construction and accumulation of precious, non-binary, [non] human companion forms.
Kefford’s work deals with feelings of social disturbance and queer possibility, a merging of multiple narratives in which fact and fiction intersect. His works are a diverse cultural archaeology of fragmented future.
David Kefford: In Search of a Higher Shelf, Curated by Kristian Day, October 22nd – November 27th 2022, 71 Tenison Rd, Cambridge CB1 2EF quipandcuriosity.com
About the artist
David Kefford is a multi-disciplinary artist. Kefford’s work has been extensively exhibited and commissioned in the UK and internationally. Exhibitions include: The Feel of Things, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka (2017), Pocket Sculptures, Art at ARB, University of Cambridge (2017), Constructive Spaces, ICA (2016) The Soft Landscape, North West Cambridge (2015), Sequences VII: Real Time Arts Festival, Iceland (2015) Hey, I’m Mr Poetic, Wysing Arts Centre (2014), Skittish, Vane, Newcastle (2013, The Hair of the Dog, Block 336, London (2012) New Foragers, Collyer Bristow, London (2012) One Minute Volume 5, De Anza Experimental Film, Cupertino, California (2011) Party Animal, SUGAR, New York (2010), Performing Presence, The National Centre for Contemporary Art, St Petersburg (2010) One Thing Against Another, Aspex, Portsmouth, 2008; ArtFutures 08, Bloomberg Space, London, 2008 The Balance of Being, National Solo Touring Exhibition (2005)
He is founding member of artist run group, Aid & Abet in Cambridge. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at University of Hertfordshire and regularly lectures in other further and higher educational institutions and gives public talks in museum and gallery contexts.
