External Funders

The Henry Moore Foundation
The Scottish Arts Council
The Dewar Arts Award
Deveron Arts
Aberdeenshire Visual Arts Awards

DAVID BLYTH

Biographical Statement

David Blyth studied painting and sculpture at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen graduating with an MA degree in Fine Art in 1999. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has participated in numerous residency programmes, public arts projects and commissions. In 2003, he was selected to participate in Zenomap, Scotland’s first presentation of art at the Venice Biennale; and contributed to the Glenfiddich international residency programme in 2004. In recent times, Blyth has had a solo exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery that was supported by The Henry Moore Foundation and was awarded the Dewar Arts Award in 2006.

Blyth continues to operate his creative practice from the North East of Scotland and is affiliated to Deveron Arts and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. He joined the academic staff at Grays in 2004 teaching sculpture and painting, and in 2007 became a permanent lecturer on the First Year programme.

Research Statement

Blyth investigates the liminal threshold between the real and the mythological, alluding to rites of passage such as birth and death through complex collage installations. He creates surreal allegories that subvert the factual with the fictional, the benign with the fetishistic developing complex collage installation pieces. Working with very high production values (taxidermy), he invites the audience into the apparently familiar world of lambing or horse handling and invests that world with painstaking transformations that unnerve, evoke superstition and create ambiguity.

His recent project Knockturne (2007) explored lambing as a dark narrative of contradictory aesthetic values through collaboration with a local shepherd in rural Aberdeenshire. By exploiting the aesthetic of installation and surrealism as a genre, the very cultural specific is conceptualised and represented as a provocation about value and inhabitation.

My RAE research outputs contribute to the Challenging Making thematic.

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