About

David Kenney paints, makes sculpture and writes.

David uses hard-edge painting, primarily with acrylics, to explore shadow and light in architectural forms. His paintings consist of many layers, adding and removing paint using a variety of methods and tools to achieve realistic textures.

His sculptural work explores similar themes to his paintings, with recurring motifs of basic architectural forms included throughout. David uses cast and mould to create precise, geometric forms in Jesmonite, using acid to remove surface layers to produce a concrete-like texture; often using coal, rusted iron and moss to create variation.

In all of his visual work, David pays particular attention to texture, shadow and light to give the pieces a feeling of past use and interaction; surfaces worn by the passing of time and human intervention occupy seemingly timeless landscapes; liminal spaces devoid of human presence.

A constant theme of worldbuilding runs through David’s work, with every piece having a place in a drafted story set in a fictional universe. Each painting or sculpture has a written counterpart; a chapter or scene that contributes to a grander narrative. 

I started drawing imagined architecture in 2019; brutalist dwellings based on basic geometric shapes.

I began to think up stories to add context to these buildings. Over time, these fragments of stories became a discernible narrative; a storyline with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I have been slowly piecing the story together over time. The world I’ve built is called The Constant State, and the story has three parts, or arcs.

My practice now revolves around and lives within this world; this story. As I make a painting or sculpture, I often write a chapter of the story to accompany it, and vice versa. As I develop my style and experiment, the story takes tangents, twists and turns. The world is being built and the story is being written one painting or sculpture at a time.