2013
EXHIBITION FOREWORD :
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...
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...
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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.
David Kemp
ONLINE CATALOGUE (click below) :
ARTIST INTERVIEW FILM :
EXHIBITION VIDEO TOUR :
BIOGRAPHY :
David Kemp was born in London in 1945 and grew up in Canada. On leaving school he went to sea as a midshipman in the Merchant Navy for four years. He attended Farnham Art School and Wimbledon School of Art from 1968 to 1972, and moved to West Cornwall in 1975 where he still lives and works.
Kemp works in a variety of materials including timber, steel and bronze, but is best known for his assemblage sculpture. He lives and works amongst the ruins of the ancient tin mines on the Tinners Coast near St Just in West Cornwall. His collections of 'Relics and Reconstructions from the Late Iron Age' have often been exhibited as spurious museum pieces. His assemblage work has been compared to the work of archaeologists and ethnologists, is often humorous and makes interesting comparisons between mythology and technology, past and future. Kemp's involvement in Public Art begun when he was artist in residence in Grizedale Forest in Cumbria in 1981. Here he learned the important links between site and content, which he has applied to the many large scale, site-specific sculptures he has built around Britain in the last twenty five years. In the eighties he built a series of large 'post-industrial' sculptures in the North East, such as 'King Coal' on the Durham moors. In 1987 he built the 'Navigators', a very large bronze and steel kinetic sculpture on the Thames near London Bridge. He has built site-specific sculptures for rural and urban spaces; outdoors and interior; pedestrian areas, parks and cityscapes. More recently he has undertaken a series of large sculptures for the Eden Project in Cornwall.