DAVID TEAGER-PORTMAN

Other Side wooden boat, concrete, unfired hand-made bricks 2010

Reversible iroku hardwood, padauk hardwood, brass 2011

ARTIST STATEMENT

The sculpture I make is an assemblage of made sculpted forms and found objects articulated in coherent form. I am interested in creating work that is felt in the base of your stomach as well as your head – by this I mean the uncanny, indescribable and in descript, searching for an evocation and a culmination towards an emotional response including memories that can be universally attached to an object.

Veiled and direct appropriation is used in combination, as is visual punctuation employing emblematic items in poetic representation and vibrant blocks of colour. Weight, balance, movement, and momentum, are constantly toyed with in both intrinsic and banal ways.

Addressing the familiarity of personal proportion and human scale is interconnected with the intervention of human presence in work. The spiritual balance of a piece of work is as important as its relation and attempt at understanding transcendence overall in society.

Recently the materials I have been using are ones I feel a sensory affinity towards, especially deep, dark, tightly grained hardwoods and ornamental brass, a combination that imbues a heritage and past not owned by the work.  Concrete is also a long ongoing thematic material, representing the fabric of our very own society and cities.

I try to make it a struggle and a stretch for me to comprehend my own work and the sensation that it creates.   I am uncompromising with the associations and cross combinations of hidden, descending to lost physical representations my works take, but they are essentially me sharing my experiences observations and ideas.

David Jesse Teager-Portman