David Smith

Visual Arts

1 October 2020 — 31 January 2021

About David Smith's Commission

"With this commissioned work through The Dock, I hope to explore the theme of trees both on a local scale and what that means in the context of county Leitrim, with current issues around non-native plantations and their destructive/commercial impact. This would be set against a romanticised image of nature giving way to a darker threat with man's diminishing relationship to the natural world. I hope to draw sources from various locations in Leitrim to develop a large work or series of works that play with these themes."

About the Artist(s)

David Smith is an Irish artist who relocated home in 2016 after 11 years in Hong Kong. He works primarily in painting and occasionally in music and photographic projects. He has participated in the RHA open, Cairde Visual, The RUA Annual and RUA RED Winter Open. He has recently held solo shows in Hong Kong, The U.S. and Ireland. He has participated in the Hong Kong art prize and also in the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. His works have been featured in 7 out of 8 International Painting Annuals (INPA) published my Manifest press. Originally from Mayo, he is now based in County Sligo.

David's recent paintings depict natural forms and spaces on solid, wood panels. They use the chemical qualities of oil washes to disrupt, dissolve or decay the image surface. The light, space and forms are shifting, living and dying, displaying a fragile and temporary nature. The dynamic of the work has emerged from travelling back and forth between Ireland and Hong Kong, where he lived for over 11 years. As nature is further and further hemmed in, dominated and compromised by population, material culture and environmental degradation, this work seeks to create an internal sanctuary, that reﬂects this pressure as well as a hope for a new sublime. Inﬂuenced by zen, ink painting, abstraction and photography, they play with the mysterious and the elemental.