
David Ward: Slow time
21 March - 10 May 2009
Previously unexhibited works since 1968.
David Ward is best known for his photographic and light works of the 1980s, performances later in that decade, and architecturally related works using light, glass and sound from the 1990s to the present.
The exhibition included drawings, photography, collage, painted reliefs and film. It revealed lines of interest that persisted over four decades, representing Ward’s study of the world – of light, the body, the activity of line and the sensitive nature of surfaces. Shown together for the first time, these works provided an unusual insight into the practice of an artist.
Collaged photograms combined ordered motifs with delicate, unpredictable lines of exposed light. The filmed surface of the Orinoco River became almost immaterial, as did the photographed patina of Rodin’s sculpture The Age of Bronze. Line drawings conveyed the stasis and motion of figures in live performance. Pastels juxtaposed two alluringly tactile, yet blank and elusive, ‘colour fields’.
Ward’s then most recent work, The Analysis of Beauty, was made especially for the exhibition and filmed in King’s College Chapel. With two films projected one above the other, the work explored the beautiful fan-vault simultaneously from below and above the ceiling.
During the exhibition a newly commissioned work by David Ward and composer Orlando Gough, Two Pianos on two floors, was installed in the house.
Find out more
Listen to an excerpt of Two Pianos on two floors, by composer Orlando Gough and David Ward, specially commissioned for the exhibition, here.