Creative Symbolism
Inside Out Magazine 06/10/2010
Lainey George
While Scottish-born, Melbourne based artist David Band doesn't think it important to table certain bits of the 'bio art is so resolutely inner-directed that a little history might help to decipher the hieroglyphs. Yes, hieroglyph is the right descriptor for his idiosyncratic shapes steeped in boggy Glasgow brights - "there's a murkiness, a touch of grey in all those tones" - because, like the ancient Egyptians, David uses simple forms to deliver his messages. "The house is an obvious reference to 'home'," he explains of a triangle atop a square, "It carries the questions of where you came from, where you going, where you put down roots." Similarly, flowers, teardrops and heads are speed-read vessels for love, loss and life.
While the corporatisation of his creativity is the design practice Mahon & Band (With partner Fiona Mahon), David confesses he's always been conscious of keeping the art and design separate -"because of all the snobbery in the art market. I've tried to give up design a couple of times and concentrate on painting, but I love it - Working with other people, taking heir ideas and turning them into something.
"But we're getting ahead of ourselves," he says, in a quick-fire Glaswegian patter that the long-term exposure to Australian 'Strine' has not slowed. "You want my life in a tweet: 26 years in the UK, 24 in Australia; about half, half. I don't feel Australian. Never will." Quick to counter any sense of disaffection with the country he lives in, David follows with the declaration that home is in the DNA.
"I don't run around in kilts, I don't fly Scottish flags out the back of my car, but saying I'm Australian doesn't seem right, because I'm not." He sits at his desk in the Melbourne weatherboard he shares with Fiona and six-year-old son Alfie and rewinds. "I was born somewhere between Glasgow and the textile town of Paisley, in the last week of 1959," he begins, peering through Brigadoon mists to a long-distance past, until Alfie reels him back to reality with the rattling of a plastic skeleton and the announcement that "the spleen arrives next week". (David explains that vital organs come affixed to a monthly educational magazine -"Imagine, $7.95 for a new liver!") "My dad wanted me to be an architect, but I decided I liked painting more, so I went to the Glasgow School or Art and the Royal College of Art in London and straight into the textile department, for shallow reasons - girls. But I discovered guys doing big screen-prints, and that experience influenced me for years to come.". After graduating from the RCA, David set up 'The Cloth' with fellow textile students Fraser Taylor, Brian Bolger and Helen Manning and started designing fabrics for such fashion heavyweights as Paul Smith, Betty Jackson, Nicole Miller and Saks Fifth Avenue. He recalls Thatcher's London as a place where creativity either threw itself into a lather of punk indignation or romantic escapism. "l was working for a young Scottish band called Altered Images, through whom I met songwriter and lead guitarist Gary Kemp, from Spandau Ballet. I designed a few album covers for them, the most famous of which was probably True." He breezes through a two-year stay in Australia and a return trip to the UK, where "miserable weather, a miserable rented apartment and a studio so cold the paintbrushes froze" quickly boomeranged him back to Melbourne. So does any of this help with the hieroglyphs? Well, yes, because David's background in textiles has you suddenly seeing his shapes as repeat patterns in the fabric of his life. Though the shapes are becoming more abstract, he tends to leave them sitting in his Balaclava studio. "l can't stand that thing of living exclusively with your own art; I surround myself with the stuff of friends," he says His regard for artist Bill Henson is apparent from his photographs on a feature wall. Within the Henson void floats the face of a fragile girl whose stare fixes on a Band print on the facing wall. Her unsettling intensity is underscored by a cabinet-top grouping of 1950s 'Rorstrand' Swedish ceramics. These sober shapes comfortably slip into dialogue with the desolate girl. Their conversation has carried from an entry-hall exchange between John Young’s realism and Dale Frank's dripping abstraction to the living room, where David Shrigley's untidy figuration gives Chris Connell's straight-backed minimalist sculpture the big thumbs up. The art chatter is inescapable but inspiring, so much so that Fiona and David have decided not to let the decorative one-liner distract. Carpets, chain and curtains are kept quiet in monochromes and clean lines. "I don't like taking somebody's work and slapping type all over it," he says, extending his hate of superfluous print on the page to home decoration. "Why stick stuff on the picture that already tells the Saying nothing often says everything."
David Band is exhibiting at Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney, Oct 20-Nov 7.