Duncan Mountford MRSS

I was born in Liverpool, UK, to a working-class, Roman Catholic, family. I studied Art Foundation in Liverpool from 1972 to 1973, and then BA Fine Art in Coventry from 1973 to 1976. I stayed in Coventry working as a community artist and painter of murals until 1984, when I returned to Liverpool and joined the Arena Studios Group. In 1993 I undertook a MA in Sculpture at Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1994. In 1998 I was awarded a scholarship for a PhD at Nottingham Trent University, which I completed 2004. I have worked as an exhibition technician, museum object handler, gallery invigilator, curator, and visiting lecturer. I have exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and have work in private collections and in the University of Liverpool. I am currently a Visiting Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, a post I have held since 2013. My work is sculpture, installation, drawing, and writing, with ideas based on unstated narratives. The works are scenes, stage sets, deliberately theatrical interior spaces, each an interregnum in a story. Materials are practical, quotidian - plywood, timber, cardboard, paint, light – with a dialogue between initial concepts and the construction of the work. The visual spatial appeal is the motor that drives the process, producing works that engage viewers on multiple levels. The ideas underlying the work ranges from the historical to the weird, the sense of a world that resonates with ghosts from the future. Imagery is drawn from old science-fiction television, contemporary events, the ruins that litter cities. The interiors are rabbit holes into the realms of the strange and conspiratorial, sets from unmade films, dream spaces at the edge of nightmares.