Biog/Artist Statement

Biography

David Fyans is a Scottish artist with a deep and profound connection to sound, sculpture and the still and moving image. He deals in sound, ritual, performance, installation, text and still and moving images to convey the conceptual ideas behind his work. His main influences lean towards subconscious interventions, mysticism, psychology, psychogeography, extra-dimensional and liminal spaces and ruminations on time and our understanding of it.

David Fyans performs sculptural audio, ritual performance pieces and improvised works regularly along with both digital and physical releases as under his own name, and as Erstlaub, on Broken20, Highpoint lowlife, Moving Furniture and CONV and has performed live in Germany, London, Brighton and throughout Scotland.

He is also Art Director and assists in the co-running of Broken20, a tiny Glasgow based record label which releases both physical and digitally via channels such as iTunes, Boomkat, Zero”, etc.

Artist Statement

I believe the role of the artist is one of shamanic intervention. By descending into oneiric and ethereal realms and, through research, practice, action and enactment, drawing out the details of some enquiry and bringing this arcane knowledge back into the physical world and presenting this revelation to present to the community.

Inhabiting the spaces between, the artist has the unique ability to cast light (and shade) into the everyday, imbuing physical space or material with the potential for some psychic enlightenment – joy, sadness, profundity, a new (or renewed) experience, a new perspective on the human condition, divined from the deepest realms of internal space. This operation results in and experience that would not be accessible without the ability of the artist to create, refine, destroy or renew physical matter in previously unconsidered configurations.

The artist is a compound of experience, an aggregate of everything seen, read, heard, thought, dreamed, experienced combined with knowledge, skills, talent and ability to shape materials and media stochastically and heuristically into a desired outcome.

With this in mind, within my own practice, which I consider to be multidisciplinary, I embrace the unknown. Some glimmer of thought, a piece partially seen in the state between wakefulness and sleep, the result of a mental distraction, some daydream or the way light catches a certain object, leads down a path of enquiry – a quest to reach the essence or tone suggested in the mind.

Often I find that the works themselves inform the medium, modes of production and presentation and it is my task to resolve and refine these aspects, to negotiate some intervention that bridges the spaces between the conceptual and the physical, be it through sculptural sound, physical objects or images and imagery created or in any apposite combination of platforms that may form a cohesive whole.

In presenting work to the public, I strive to leave room for interpretation and experience. While I have my own motivations and conceptual underpinnings, I feel that to enforce my meaning of a work on the viewer closes the potential for their own understanding. It is not my job to tell someone what they should experience, only to set up the potential for them to have their own relationship with the work they have shared space with.

Links

www.erstlaub.co.uk/dfyans

www.erstlaub.co.uk/ntc

https://erstlaub.bandcamp.com/

www.vimeo.com/erstlaub

https://www.youtube.com/user/Erstlaub

www.flickr.com/erstlaub

 

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