david kefford

BEYOND HUMAN: BECOMING HYBRID

Opens in Black Box Project Space

University for the Creative Arts, Farnham

Tuesday 8 April: Artist Talk 4-5pm (W02) & Opening Event: 5.15 - 7pm

Open Weekdays 10am-4pm:Wed 9 - Fri 11 April | MON 28 April - FRI 23 May

We are thrilled to announce our next Black Box project at University for the Creative Arts at Farnham campus. Beyond Human: Becoming Hybrid, is a solo exhibition by David Kefford, featuring outdoor ‘bodily’ sculptural assemblages, experimental test pieces, works on paper, and a single-screen animation. Kefford’s practice explores material precarity, site-responsive making, and the entanglement of human and non-human entities. Situated within Black Box and the surrounding courtyard space, the exhibition examines how sculptures adapt to and respond to their environment.  Kefford’s practice is informed by Queer Ecology and Post-Humanist thought, drawing on Donna Haraway’s influential book Staying with the Trouble, in which species, matter, and time co-exist in unpredictable entanglements. His works embrace impermanence, instability, and material agency, challenging traditional sculptural permanence and monumentality. Kefford constructs hybrid sculptural forms from discarded, found, and biodegradable materials, embracing a process of playful improvisation where objects are intuitively assembled, reconfigured, and transformed, allowing materials to shape their own narratives. This exhibition explores sculpture as a site of becoming - a space where materials shift, degrade, and reform, echoing the precarious conditions of our ecological time.

About the Artist

David Kefford is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Cambridge, UK. His work has been widely exhibited and commissioned both in the UK and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions, biennials, festivals, and public art contexts. Kefford has received numerous grants and awards, including a Develop Your Creative Practice Grant from Arts Council England, a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award, an Escalator Visual Arts Award, and the Roy Noakes Bursary Prize from the Royal British Society of Sculptors. His work is held in a number of public and private collections. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and a Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (MRSS).

For more information images, or interview requests contact David Kefford: @davidkefford | https://www.davidkefford.com/

For information about Black Box contact  agregson@ucreative.ac.uk @blackboxuca www.blackboxprojectspace.squarespace.com 

@ucafarnhamart | @mafineartucafarnham   

University for the Creative Arts at Farnham, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7DS