David MacDiarmid trained in Architectural Design (MA Hons.) at the University of Edinburgh, and in Fine Art (MA) at City & Guilds of London Art School. He has been a recipient of the Fenton Arts Trust, and a chosen MA Stars recipient from arts organisation Axisweb. He has been artist in residence at Chisenhale Studios, London, GARAGE as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and at Extractor Space, London.
As part of on-going collective Expedition to the Icebergs he received a commission to create a radio broadcast for Project Radio, Leeds. Recently he has shown at Blueprints, Romamsusan, Chicago, was commissioned to create work for the Arts Council funded Engage Festival, Berkshire, and is currently working on the creative design for a series of Wellcome Trust funded installations.
My practice explores the intermediary zones which lie between the boundaries of subject areas. I draw from sources such as geometric theory, domestic design history, and representations of science in the media to create my abstract works. I interrogate the idea of forms which can appear to be in semi or partial states of existence, never fully being part of one definition or another.
Cutting, creasing, tearing, assembling. Crafting spurs the notion that these objects may have been made for a purpose, but their forms suggest they could be some type of scientific model, or an unidentified industrial remnant.
The process of making is laid bare. Touch forms a connection, as a record of making and as memory of these everyday materials which we have experienced. The chosen materials are pushed to their limits, they are made to perform new tasks within sculpture, they crack, bend, disconnect. Drawing my palette from the everyday; pedestrian materials, the stuff which surrounds us, I use its inherent familiarity as an invitation to engage with the work. We are invited to discover these materials in new ways, in these pseudo-scientific forms which begin to establish their individual identities, and create for themselves their own uncanny nomadic personalities.