About

David Spriggs’ art lies in the interval between two and three dimensions, where the planar becomes volumetric, images take form, and form becomes image.

In 1999, Spriggs pioneered the systematic distribution of painted imagery across many transparent planes, so that separate images coalesce into a volumetric spatial form. Over more than twenty five years, this approach has developed into a broader investigation of immaterial form, colour, perception, natural force and the symbolic structures of power.

His works envelop the viewer in a kind of holographic atmosphere, transforming vision into a physical encounter. From one position an image can appear almost solid, while from another it separates into planes, intervals and empty space. This paradox between presence and absence approaches what might be called a sculpture of the immaterial. At monumental scale, waves, clouds, vortices, figures and fields of colour can command architectural space while remaining physically discontinuous. Empty space participates in their construction as actively as pigment and material.

A recurring condition in Spriggs’ imagery is imminence: a wave before it breaks, a cloud gathering, or an explosive mass suspended between expansion and collapse. These images suggest movement, pressure and force while the artwork itself remains completely still. Movement is held within the image as potential and displaced onto the viewer, whose changing position causes forms to gather, fragment and re-form. Stillness slows perception down, allowing fleeting conditions to become sustained moments of contemplation.

Across Spriggs’ practice, colour, transparency and material also carry symbolic meaning. In his Stratachromes, colour is layered through depth until it seems to possess volume, density and atmosphere, while drawing on bodily, cultural and political associations. His work engages with contemporary issues through natural forms, figures, monuments and systems of surveillance, bringing ideas of the sublime, authority, visibility and power into the same perceptual space. Transparency functions both as a material and as a metaphor, exploring the relationship between revealing, visibility, surveillance and power. The work is phenomenological in a direct sense: what is perceived changes with the viewer’s body, position and movement. Layering is therefore a means rather than the subject itself, part of a broader inquiry into how images take form and how material and immaterial qualities can occupy the same space.