Biography
David's practice emerges from a lived relationship with the world around him. Through observation, collecting, foraging and responding to everyday encounters, he works with discarded materials and forgotten objects, drawn to their overlooked potential and the possibility of second lives. Carrying traces of previous use, these materials become companions in an open-ended process of transformation and continual becoming.
Working through improvised, low-tech methods of assemblage, Kefford approaches making as a process of enquiry, allowing ideas to emerge through sustained attention to materials rather than predetermined outcomes. His sculptures occupy liminal states between usefulness and redundancy, repair and collapse, familiarity and strangeness. Constructed from reclaimed materials, they remain open to change, embracing vulnerability, instability and incompleteness as active components of the work.
Increasingly, his practice has expanded beyond the studio into his sculpture garden, which functions as an outdoor studio, living laboratory and experimental research site. Here, sculptures continue to evolve through relationships with weather, plants, fungi, insects and other more-than-human participants. Growth, erosion, decomposition and repair become integral to the sculptural process, allowing the work to develop beyond the artist's direct authorship. Time itself becomes another material, and sculpture is understood as an ongoing ecological relationship rather than a fixed object.
Kefford is currently undertaking a practice-based Doctor of Fine Art (DFA) at the University of Hertfordshire, where his research investigates sustainable approaches to outdoor sculpture through ecological methodologies and seasonal forms of making. He holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Brighton. His work is held in a number of public and private collections and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles), Exeter Phoenix and the Royal Society of Sculptors Summer Show. He has received awards from the Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England and the Firstsite Collectors' Group Bursary.
Fox Companion (Nocturnal Encounter) documents repeated nocturnal visits by a fox encountering a series of temporary sculptures within the artist's garden during the summer of 2025. Recorded using a wildlife camera, the film captures an unplanned encounter between sculpture and a more-than-human participant, presenting sculpture as an open-ended ecological relationship shaped through curiosity, chance and shared agency.