Making Dig: Daniel Silver in conversation with James Lingwood
Shortly following its opening, Daniel Silver discussed his project Dig with Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood at the artist's studio. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.
James Lingwood: Daniel, I want to start by asking you about your first memory of looking at sculpture.
Daniel Silver: My parents grew up in South Africa and Zimbabwe. We had some African sculptures, and there was one, which my parents still have, which is a mother and child. It’s wood, very totemic. I remember throughout my childhood just playing with this, pushing it over, standing up with it, moving it around. It’s probably from the seventies and it’s a kind of modernist version of an African sculpture. Whenever I go back home I always see it. If there is anything I want from my parents, it’s this sculpture.
Did you know as a kid growing up in Jerusalem that this was an African sculpture? Did it feel different, alien to the environment you were growing up in, not the domestic environment but the cultural environment?
The domestic environment was brown wood so it sort of fitted into the aesthetics of the house, but it was very different from anything I saw outside.
Were you in the Old City?
I went to an experimental school in the market in Jerusalem. Throughout my childhood, one of my mother’s friends used to take us to archaeological digs, which was a very strange thing to do on the weekend.
Read the rest of this conversation.
Image: Daniel Silver, Dig (2013). Photograph: Marcus J Leith
Audio: The Artangel Podcast 7, Diggings
22 minutes 55 seconds
In episode 7 of the Artangel Podcast, an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst visit Dig.
The three experts encounter the split-level work for the first time and explore its many layers of possible meaning: from Freudian visions of Rome and the subconscious to the iconography of unknowable utopias.
Featuring:
- Ludovic Coupaye, lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at UCL and curator of the Ethnographic Collection
- Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator at the British Museum with responsibility for ancient Greek collections
- Jay Watts, psychotherapist, Lacanian analyst and Senior Lecturer at City University
- Daniel Silver, the artist behind Dig
Producer: Peter Meanwell
Image: Detail from Daniel Silver's Dig (2013). Photograph: Marcus J Leith
… there are also vestigial traces of the grand picture palace: in the car park’s sloping floor, where the auditorium once stood; in the remains of the proscenium arch and the plasterwork of the orchestra; and the bright green terrazzo floor of the former entrance hall. – Christopher Turner
Texts: Four writers on Dig
In a series of texts variously written before, during and after a visit to the installation, four writers respond to the literary, psychological and occasionally whimsical notions of art and artefacts unearthed by Dig.
Christopher Turner, Sex and the Eternal City
Sharon Kivland, A London Fantasy
Audio: Excavations, Iwona Blazwick, Ian Jenkins and Adam Phillips discuss Dig
1 hour 10 minutes 37 seconds
Excavations
In this talk Iwona Blazwick, Ian Jenkins and Adam Phillips discuss Silver's sculptures as objects from an unfamiliar culture.
Recorded at The Slade Research Centre, 29 October 2013.
Also available to hear on Soundcloud.
Publication: Dig
Edited by James Lingwood, with an essay by Tom Morton
- Designed by Modern Activity
- Photographs by Alice May Williams and Marcus Leith
- Printed by Lecturis, Eindhoven
- Hardback, 96pp, 200mm x 150mm.
- Printed in an edition of 500 copies
- ISBN 978-1-902201-29-0
Daniel Silver
Daniel Silver is a sculptor born in London in 1972, raised in Jerusalem, moving back to London in 1994. He has exhibited extensively across the UK and internationally. Solo presentations include Coming Together, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2011); The Smoking Silver Father Figures, Frieze Sculpture Park, London (2010); Frieze Art Fair, London (2009); and Heads, Camden Arts Centre, London (2007). Group exhibitions include We Will Live, We Will See, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2011); Savage Messiah, Rob Tufnell at 1 Sutton Lane, London (2011); No New Thing Under the Sun, Royal Academy, London (2010); and Newspeak: British Art Now, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg and Saatchi Gallery, London (2009). Silver is the recipient of numerous awards including the Henry Moore Artist in Residency (2005), Rome Scholar in Fine Arts (2002) and Credit Suisse First Boston Award (2001). He holds a BA Fine Art from Slade School of Art and an MA Fine Art Sculpture from the Royal College of Art.
Images: (both) Daniel Silver in his studio (2013). Photograph: Marcus Leith
Who made this possible?
Credits
Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation. With thanks to University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.
