David Spriggs
Practice
The artwork of David Spriggs lies in a space between the 2 and 3 dimensions.
Since 1999, Spriggs has developed a distinctive visual language in which painting occupies real space. Painted marks, photography, drawing, and digital modelling are distributed across sequences of transparent planes. Seen together, these separate images coalesce into forms that appear volumetric while remaining physically dispersed.
The work is neither a conventional picture nor a solid sculpture. It operates at the threshold between them, where image, object, light, and atmosphere continually exchange roles. In a culture dominated by flat screens and images made for immediate consumption, Spriggs constructs works that must be encountered slowly, bodily, and in real space.
01
The image made spatial
Western painting has long used perspective to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. Spriggs reverses this operation. Instead of representing space pictorially, he distributes the image through actual depth.
His work can be situated within a history extending from Renaissance perspective to the multiple viewpoints of Cubism, Futurism’s attempts to represent movement and duration, Constructivism’s expansion into real space, and the perceptual concerns of Light and Space. Yet Spriggs’ work remains distinctly pictorial. Waves, clouds, vortices, figures, and systems retain the symbolic and illusionistic force of images even as they occupy the viewer’s physical environment.
Perspective becomes more than a device for depicting the world. It positions the viewer and organises what can be seen. Spriggs gives this structure a physical presence: the image is divided, its intervals become real, and the viewer’s position becomes the point from which its fragments are assembled. Seeing is exposed as an active construction rather than a neutral act.
02
Strata perspective
Spriggs describes his method as strata perspective. Using painting, drawing, photography, digital modelling, or combinations of these, he divides an image or spatial model into successive sections. These are painted or printed across transparent planes and aligned in depth.
From a principal viewpoint, the layers coalesce into an apparently continuous volume. From another position, the form stretches, dissolves, or reveals the physical distances between its parts. No individual plane contains the complete image. The visible form emerges through the relationship between many partial images.
This is the essential distinction: technique establishes the physical conditions of the work, but perception completes it. The image is not simply placed inside the sculpture. It comes into being through the encounter between material structure, surrounding space, and the moving viewer.
03
Embodied perception
Spriggs’ work treats seeing as embodied rather than detached. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, perception is not the passive reception of a finished world. It unfolds through the body’s orientation, movement, memory, and relation to space.
Spriggs’ images demand this active form of looking. As viewers move, the work gains coherence and loses it again. The body discovers the point at which dispersed planes become a unified form, then witnesses that unity come apart. Vision becomes an event unfolding over time, and the viewer enters the work’s changing visual field.
The transparent layers give physical form to Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining of the visible and the invisible. Empty intervals are not simply absences; they allow the image to emerge. The form is vividly present without existing as a continuous material body, so what cannot be seen remains essential to what can be seen.
Gestalt perception is equally important. The mind organises fragments into a meaningful whole, although that whole has no independent material existence. The construction establishes the conditions for the image, but its completed form remains optical, provisional, and dependent upon the viewer.
04
Immaterial form, colour, and the sublime
Spriggs transforms painting into immaterial, volumetric form. Waves, clouds, vortices, figures, and geometric bodies possess scale and depth without conventional mass. Transparent supports, pigment, light, and measured intervals are entirely physical, yet together they produce forms that appear atmospheric and unstable.
Colour is released from the surface and given volume. It accumulates through transparent depth, intensifying where layers overlap and thinning where they separate. In the Stratachrome works, colour becomes spatial rather than applied. Red can appear to bleed into or fill space; black suggests density or absence; spectral sequences divide, concentrate, and transform as the viewer changes position.
In works such as First Wave, Gravity, and Axis of Power, this instability enters the territory of the sublime. Waves, gravitational fields, and cosmic formations appear overwhelming yet strangely weightless. Monumental scale makes the viewer acutely aware of the body, while transparency denies the solidity normally associated with monumentality. Force is held in suspension between movement and stasis.
05
Transparency, images, and power
Transparency is both material and metaphor. It can suggest access, openness, and truth, but it can equally imply exposure, surveillance, and control. This instability connects the optical structure of the work to wider questions about how images organise bodies, institutions, information, and belief.
Byung-Chul Han describes a contemporary culture driven by excessive visibility, in which everything is expected to become immediately accessible as information. Spriggs’ work complicates that demand. Although its material is transparent, the image is never completely available. It depends upon distance, concealment, empty intervals, and sustained looking.
In works such as Transparency Report, Stratachrome, Gold, and Axis of Power, the construction of the image is inseparable from its political meaning. Movement reveals that what first appears authoritative or complete has been constructed from partial views. Visibility is not neutral, and transparency does not guarantee truth. Both can produce glare, exposure, hierarchy, and control as readily as knowledge.
06
The origins of the work
Spriggs’ first experiment in creating a volumetric image across multiple transparent planes took place in 1999, while he was studying at Central Saint Martins in London. At the time, this was an unusual and largely unexplored approach to image making. A sequence of separately painted layers could be perceived as a single form suspended in space.
In 2001, Perceptible Consciousness introduced the cloud as an image assembled through transparent depth. The work entered the permanent collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and became an early milestone in a method that Spriggs has continued to advance ever since.
Across changes in subject, material, and scale, from intimate display cases to monumental museum installations and permanent public artworks, the practice returns to a persistent question: how does an image become spatial, and what happens when what we perceive depends upon our own position within it?