Dan Davis
Statement
Looking across a gallery you will see either a very furry canvas of quite bright colours resembling a face of an animal and/or in comparison small black vitrines/Dioramas containing small objects, and figurines of interest.
The fur "paintings" are made by covering an already stretched canvas with a layer of the faux fur which can be shop bought by the metre. Shapes are cut out of the canvas/fur the resulting void is filled by three dimensional facsimiles of the cut shape which are made from paper and plaster strips.
My Dioramas are hand made display cabinets made from pre-cut wood and transparent Perspex. The stories with-in are made with paper, clay, modelling putty, acrylic hardeners and mediums, acrylic paints and gravel and glass beads.
My main reasoning behind this work in conjunction with another series (urban birds) is an exploration of texture. Just as a chef conjures up recipes for a dish with complimentary or contrasting flavours, so my aim is to do this with texture, my Dioramas are small concentrated recipes with a whimsical story and are influenced by stop frame animations. The faux fur set are far more simple conclusions, although the juxtaposition of fur, cut paper and silky smooth acrylic is infinite.