In Cloud Country
Harewood House, Yorkshire
29 March – 30 June 2013
In Cloud Country – Abstracting from nature was a group exhibition jointly curated by Iwona Blazwick and Diane Howse.
David Ward artist statement for catalogue:
Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone.
Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!
These words by James Joyce are from a nocturnal scene in ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. They express something of my lifelong experience of the wonder of light and dark and the natural world. Afterall, nightfall reveals the presence of stars.
In 1994, when I was invited to Harvard University, I made a sound work for voices, replayed between dusk and darkness, from thirty speakers suspended in the elm trees of Harvard Yard. The work was titled Canopy – a work for voice and light’. Those trees then formed one of the largest surviving stands of elms remaining in that part of North America.
The origins of Canopy 2011 in the exhibition, stem from there.
Canopy
2011
Gold leaf on collaged image
21 x 29.5 cm
Private Collection
