The Skinny Showcase: David Ogle

Gallery by Lauren Strain | 29 Oct 2013

David Ogle

David Ogle is a Liverpool-based artist and PhD researcher at The University of Liverpool in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).

“Exploring the concept of drawing has remained central to my practice for some years now, asking what it is to generate marks and to describe with line.

“The nature of line itself has become a key consideration in much of my work and I have increasingly begun to regard it as a fundamental element, one that transcends mediums and emerges within numerous disciplines.

“Line begins, it spans a distance, and ultimately it ends. It is durational; it traces a progression from one place to another. From the marks of a pencil, to a flow of prose, to the sustained oscillations of a musical note; the spatial and temporal actuality of line charts its course. Investigating an understanding of line in this way has led me to a practice and working methodology that is, in a sense, self-reflexive; marks that describe the process of their own making – a drawing of drawing itself.

“Line can multiply across a surface; it can trace paths through space and even navigate along with the passage of time. What, then, is line, and how can we categorise its materiality and formal properties?

“Flatness is perhaps the property that we most associate with drawing, but line is not restricted to a two-dimensional plane. Line can navigate space just as it does surface. The capacity to emerge within both of these contexts reveals line as something neither wholly flat nor wholly spatial; it is an abstracted, conceptual form, one whose formal properties are not anchored to material. Not flatness then, but masslessness; it is the absence of materiality that characterises the nature of line.

“This, however, raises a problem, as it is objects and their material elements that frame our experience of even the most conceptually driven work in a visual medium. How can we perceive line without material, without mass? In pursuit of this, I have attempted to work with line using a medium that is divorced from the static and sculptural nature of physical material, one that flows in constant motion and is the weightless foundation of visual perception itself: light.

“Using light as a primary medium, I have increasingly questioned its connection to empty space and the reciprocal relationship that exists between light and dark – whereby one cannot exist without the other.

“Just as we require silence for a sound to come to the fore, and blankness to understand a composition on a flat surface, it is only in darkness where one can witness light return. There is a co-dependence between these opposites; they are dualities of being that are tightly bound to one another.

“Our relationship to light in nature is one that is based around this duality, the daily shifting of night into day. I think it is in these transitional stages that our connection to light is at its most profound; the spectral effects of sunlight drawing a line along the passage of time as the sun arcs from horizon to horizon.”

  • Exhibiting at: Making Sense, Fallout Factory, Liverpool, until 8 Nov; Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival, until 22 Nov; Crystallize, Old Billingsgate Market, London, 4-6 Nov
http://www.davidogle.co.uk