David Ward: Touching Light

4 Oct-16 Nov 2025

Overview

The New Art Centre at Roche Court Sculpture Park is delighted to announce David Ward: Touching Light, a solo exhibition in the gallery and orangery. This exhibition brings together a group of recent pieces by David Ward, made in the last year, that meditate on the nature of light and gravity.

Ward’s preoccupation with light is a thread that has run consistently through his work for the past four decades, dating back to early light drawings and the dance work Huge Veil produced at Riverside Studios in 1984. In this show, Ward touches on childhood memories of light’s transience, ranging from flickering car headlights to cinematic projections, to create a new body of work.

A dense network of literary and personal references under-pin each individual piece in Touching Light. At the core of the exhibition are the archival prints I felt my life with both my hands, which take their title from the first line of the Emily Dickinson poem, number 357. The photographs of the artist’s hands evoke birds, in the form of shadow play games, which in turn refer to the myth of Icarus. By layering cultural, autobiographical and literary references in this way, Ward brings together a number of lenses through which the viewer can be drawn into his work.

David Ward (b. 1951) attended Wolverhampton School of Art (1968 – 69) and Winchester School of Art (1969 – 1973). He is known for his work in a range of light and time-based media, including installations, photography, performance, film, sound and painting. The body and the dynamics of light are central to his work. Language, written and spoken, appears within his work in the form of live and recorded readings and poetic texts.

Ward has also collaborated with other artists, choreographers, architects and composers. He has been artist-in-residence at King’s College, Cambridge, Harvard University, Durham Cathedral and was a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. His work is represented in a number of public collections including Tate, The National Portrait Gallery, Arts Council England, the Fogg Museum at Harvard Art Museums and the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney.

He has curated exhibitions, film programmes and events including co-selecting The British Art Show 3 in 1990 and more recently, co-curating the exhibition Seeing Round Corners at Turner Contemporary, Margate in 2016.