David Kefford’s trans-disciplinary practice is research driven and builds relationships between marginal communities and situated sites often on the precipice of change or undergoing transformation. 

Working with synthetic materials and (non)bio-degradable stuff he explores his immediate local ecology by transforming abandoned objects and materials into something other - unknown entities – unanchored from their original environment, beyond human, mutant-like and mutable. His characterful sculptures engender a form of empathy with the non-human, suggesting all things have ‘souls and agency’ and seem to speculate that if the world is transforming into an inhospitable rubbish dump, then evolving life-forms will need to adapt by mimicking waste and bodily incorporating detritus. A cyclical form of activism, which he describes as ”creative composting”.

For Kefford there exists a Queer Ecology to these agglomerations, a form of world-building seen through the lens of the ruptured and fragmented, seemingly disposed of and forgotten things - the afterlife of stuff in the all-consuming Anthropocene, that embrace the uncertainty of a changing world.

What happens to the sculptures he crrently makes is now reaching a critical point in terms of how they are made and more importantly how the materials used to make them are wasted. This has led him to question: What is the lifespan of these sculptures?

Should they be allowed to decay and deteriorate steadily or should they be preserved/archived?

Can sculptures be replenished or ‘re-materialised’ utilising more sustainable, eco-friendly materials and methods? or be ‘de-materialised’, reducing the material energy required to make them by having an after-life in some other form?