David Bethell is Director of AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, and has worked on various projects with Longhouse over the years.

To find out more about these click on the links below:

Stoke-on-Trent PAD

Interrogation: Walsall

Talking City Com:mission

Artist Statement:

Investigating transforming environments, objects and their characteristics into new alignments forms the basis of my work. What happens when familiar environments and objects adopt other functions and characteristics? What happens when a hybrid is made? Where will it leave the new environment, the new object? What will happen to its familiar rules, its familiar history? What has caused this transformation?

Has it stemmed from our consciousness; our desire to change; our desire to find the ideal? Does this come from our boredom with where this thought of consciousness came from?

We will always seek the ideal, whether this is in our next holiday, job or home we will always seek something more; our struggle to be satisfied is eternal. We live under the fear of loneliness, nothingness and boredom. We are constantly prolonging the actual, because our imagination succeeds us and we believe that we can make the unthinkable happen. What happens when we explore our personal aspirations, passions, dreams and desires and how they collide with mundane situations or environments?

We get a cross between the imaginable and the actual. We get something that is unfamiliar, a strange, poetic, ambiguous transformation. We also get something that doesn’t live up to our imagination; we get something that has failed our aspirations; something that is not quite right; something that doesn’t quite work. We have set ourselves up for failure.