Artist : David Kemp
Title : Released Spirit
Medium : beach waste assemblage
Size : 50 x 50 x 10 cm


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There was once a clever tribe
Whose knowledge tied the four corners of the world together.
Their sorcerers had many powers.
They made great poles that held the sky up.
They had great cunning with fire
They could make the night like day.
They could send pictures in the wind
Their long tongues could speak over many miles
Their warriors were fierce and powerful.
They rose in the air, over land and sea.
They overcame all the other tribes of the earth.

One day the smoke from their many clevernesses grew thick,
Great flames licked up the poles blocking out the sun and burning a hole in the sky.
Slowly, the sky started to fall.
Fearing the dreadful weight of the clouds
The tribe dug deep holes in the ground.
Here they hide with all their clever things
Awaiting the day when the sky is pushed back up.


‘Released Spirits’ was made from a plastic chemical container washed up on the beach in West Cornwall. The playfulness and inherent humour of David Kemp’s assembled artefacts cannot mask a more serious underbelly or his intention to expose our folly and or materialist excesses. Driven by his own apocalyptic and subversive vision, he makes sculpture from the disregarded bits and pieces left by successive consumer boom. These remains point out the awful truth – that we value trash and are seduced again and again by the trumped-up new. Technology that is phoney, or only half understood, is grasped at for answers to our needs. In pursuit of the largest thing, it becomes impossible to tell real technological advances from the dead-ends. By making what might have been, or should have been he mirrors our universal human weakness.

David Kemp was born in London in 1945 and grew up in Canada, he has for many years worked amongst the ruins of the ancient tin mines on the Tinners Coast near St Just in West Cornwall, creating his collections of ‘Relics and Reconstructions from the Late Iron Age’. His assemblage work has been compared to the work of archaeologists and ethnologists, forging comparisons between mythology and technology, past and future. Kemp has produced many public artworks and has exhibited widely with works acquired by many museum collections internationally.



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