Daniel Duford

ARTIST STATEMENT

Here’s the central image of my artistic practice– an enormous tree growing out of a half- buried storage jar. The roots have cracked the walls of the submerged pot and suck up nutrients from deep in mythic and historic earth. The disparate branches unite at the nubby, gnarled trunk. The jar itself is burnished by age with fissures filigreed up to the lip from the cracked belly. The clay for the jar was dug a long time ago nearby in a dry riverbed and fired by who knows who in a crude wood-burning kiln. The tree is a maypole, boundary marker, axis mundi. I use blunt materials to tell stories. My stories generate paintings, public sculpture, books, installations and performances. The dendritic nature of my practice fans out from American mythology and folklore. In comics, narrative is understood through a sequence of panels. The space between the panels (the gutter) is filled in by the mind of the reader. What if the gutter were three- dimensional? How do we receive our stories? Mostly, we receive them in fragments. Like the broken pottery of a lost culture, we infer, we contextualize and we filter those fragments through our own beliefs and biases. The meanings are fluid.