About
David Spriggs
David Spriggs, Black and White, 2022
David Spriggs makes images that occupy the interval between two and three dimensions.
Since 1999, Spriggs has developed a distinctive visual language in which images occupy real space. Painted, printed, drawn, photographic, or digital information is divided across sequences of transparent planes. No layer contains the whole. From a principal viewpoint, these partial images coalesce into forms that appear volumetric while remaining physically dispersed.
Across works ranging from clouds and waves to the human figure and architectures of surveillance, the central question concerns both what an image represents and how it becomes convincing. Spriggs makes visible the conditions through which scattered information acquires coherence, depth, and authority. In a culture increasingly encountered through flat screens, he returns vision to movement, duration, and the physical position of the viewer.
What the viewer encounters
From the front, separately marked transparent layers join into a single image that appears to have volume. Step to either side and the image draws apart, revealing the sheets and empty intervals that produce it. Nothing in the artwork moves, yet what you see changes because you have moved. The work is never available all at once. Its appearance depends on where you stand, how you move, and how long you look.
Practice
Image, space, and perception
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. Rather than modelling volume within a single plane, he divides the image into successive sections and gives the intervals between them actual depth. Painting no longer depicts space from a distance. It enters the viewer’s space.
This method recasts perspective from a system of representation into a physical arrangement of vision. It enters into dialogue with Renaissance perspective, 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 the work remains insistently pictorial. Its spatial presence does not relinquish the symbolic and illusionistic force of the image.
The recurring wave, cloud, vortex, figure, and diagram are therefore not subjects alone. Each tests a different problem of visibility: how motion can be held, how formlessness can acquire contour, how a body or system becomes legible, and how visual coherence comes to command belief. Perception is not only the means by which the work is received. It is one of the work’s primary materials and subjects.
02
Strata perspective
Spriggs describes his method as strata perspective: an image or spatial model is divided into successive sections, then painted or printed across transparent planes and aligned in depth.
From a principal viewpoint, the layers coalesce into an apparently continuous volume. Step sideways and the form stretches, dissolves, or exposes the distances between its parts. Because no individual plane contains the complete image, its totality has no single physical location. It exists in the relation between object and observer.
The viewer occupies the position from which the fragments are brought into relation. Strata perspective produces an illusion of volume while also redistributing the making of the image. Its material conditions belong to the work, while its coherence is achieved in perception. What appears stable remains contingent upon body, time, light, and point of view.
03
Embodied perception
Spriggs’ work treats seeing as embodied, not detached. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, perception is not the passive reception of a finished world. It unfolds through the body’s orientation, movement, memory, and relation to space.
The works make this condition palpable. They solicit movement, a pause, and a return to the principal view. As the body changes position, the image gains coherence and loses it again. The viewer is not outside the work’s visual field but implicated within it. Vision becomes an encounter enacted over time.
This is also a relation of reversibility. The viewer sees the work, while the work makes the viewer aware of being a visible body within a field of light, colour, reflection, architecture, and other viewers. The artwork does not literally observe us. It reveals that seeing always occurs from a body that can itself be seen.
The transparent layers give physical form to Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining of the visible and the invisible. Empty intervals are not simply absences. They permit 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. Coherence is real as an experience, but provisional as a fact. The work makes us conscious that vision does not merely record reality. It participates in assembling it.
04
Immaterial form, colour, and the sublime
Spriggs gives volume to phenomena that ordinarily resist possession: a cloud, a wave, a vortex, a gravitational field, a blast, a human figure. These forms possess scale and depth without conventional mass. Transparent supports, pigment, light, and measured intervals are entirely physical, yet together they produce images that appear unstable, suspended, and close to disappearance.
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 bleed into or fill the surrounding space. Black can register density, absence, or withheld visibility. Spectral sequences divide, concentrate, and transform as the viewer changes position.
In First Wave, ninety painted red planes hold a crest at the threshold between formation and collapse. Gravity gives an invisible force a suspended visual body, while Axis of Power arrests a cyclone whose immense energy is available to sight but not to control. Monumental scale makes the viewer acutely aware of the body, while transparency refuses the solidity usually associated with monumentality. The sublime arises through proximity to force and the inability to master it in a single view.
05
Transparency, images, and power
Transparency is both the material condition of Spriggs’ work and one of its central contradictions. A clear plane seems to promise unobstructed access. Accumulated in depth, however, transparent surfaces produce reflection, glare, overlap, occlusion, and images that cannot be possessed from a single position. The work begins with visibility, then shows how quickly visibility becomes partial.
Byung-Chul Han describes the transparency society as a culture that treats exposure, immediacy, and the unrestricted circulation of information as unquestioned goods. Under this pressure, what cannot be made visible appears suspect, while distance, privacy, and opacity lose their legitimacy. Spriggs’ works do not illustrate Han’s argument. They give it a material counterform. The more transparent planes the viewer is invited to look through, the more apparent certainty depends upon alignment, framing, and a privileged point of view. Seeing through is never the same as knowing.
Transparency Report makes this asymmetry explicit. Four suitcases submit the possessions of imagined travellers to X ray like inspection. Objects become proxies for absent people, and identity is inferred from fragments selected by a security apparatus. The work reveals a central tension of surveillance: the subject must become legible, while the institution that defines the categories of risk remains opaque. Maximum exposure does not produce truth. It produces interpretation under unequal conditions.
Logic of Control turns this unequal visibility into architecture. Its engraved glass reconstructs the radial logic of the Panopticon, in which a possible observer occupies an unseen centre while those around it remain exposed. The structure appears open, ordered, and transparent, yet that apparent openness is precisely how control is organised. Move away from the principal viewpoint and the diagram fragments, revealing that its authority depends upon where sight is located and who controls that position.
In Data, visibility fails for another reason. A blurred white mass resembling a cloud gathers from dispersed information but refuses to become legible. Accumulation produces opacity rather than clarity. Contact stages a different limit: two tornado like forms approach at a point where they appear barely to touch. The transparent enclosure exposes the entire event, yet the decisive relation between the forms remains uncertain. Together, the works show that neither information nor proximity guarantees understanding. Other works extend this politics of vision. Stratachrome Green confronts the viewer with an excess of imagery in which complete visibility approaches blindness. Black & White makes symbolic certainty contingent upon movement, while Gold turns the monumental language of hierarchy and value on its apex. Across these works, transparency is neither celebrated as openness nor rejected as deception. It is treated as a political and perceptual relation: who or what is made visible, from where, under whose terms, and what forms of complexity or freedom may depend upon remaining opaque.
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. 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 develop.
Rather than treating this method as a fixed formula, Spriggs has used painting, printing, drawing, photography, digital imaging, and engraving to test what kinds of bodies, events, and systems can be made perceptible through layers. The scale has expanded from intimate display cases to monumental museum works and permanent public artworks, while the central instability has remained: the image appears present, but its coherence depends upon a viewer situated in space.
Across this development, the work advances a consequential proposition. An image is not a thing given to sight. It is a relation assembled among materials, histories, institutions, and bodies. By making that relation visible, Spriggs turns perception from a private faculty into a question about how reality is organised and who is permitted to define what can be seen.
Personal trajectory
From close observation to spatial images
Long before he worked with transparent planes, Spriggs learned to look by drawing animals. As a teenager in Cheshire, England, he spent hours making detailed wildlife studies, attending to the small differences through which a living form becomes recognisable. He immigrated to Canada at fourteen. The patience of that early practice has remained with him, along with a curiosity about the moment when scattered marks become a convincing image. His later work turns this curiosity back upon vision itself. Rather than simply depicting what can be seen, it asks how seeing assembles a world.
He now lives and works on Vancouver Island, close to the forest. The scale of the finished works can be architectural, but they begin with patient, repetitive decisions: one transparent plane, one partial image, one measured interval at a time. That tension between control and uncertainty is personal as well as formal. Spriggs can establish the conditions, but he cannot determine what any visitor will see, feel, or remember. Each encounter is completed by another person’s movement and attention.
Biography
David Spriggs
David Spriggs is a British and Canadian contemporary artist born in Manchester, England, in 1978. His practice spans layered spatial paintings, large scale installations, sculpture, and permanent public art. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and is based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He undertook student residencies at Central Saint Martins in London in 1999 and Bauhaus University in Weimar in 2006.
His work has been presented at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Sharjah Biennale, the Oku-Noto Triennale, Noor Riyadh, Chroniques Biennale in Marseille, the Musée de La Poste, Powerlong Museum, Times Art Museum, and the Prague Biennale. His work is held in collections including the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and is installed permanently in public and architectural settings in Canada, the United States, China, and Hong Kong.