Notes on the work
Physis, digital composite photograph, 2024
My initial post-secondary education was in 16mm film production with two Czech filmmakers, Vaclav Taborsky and Frank Valert, at the Conestoga College, Kitchener, Ontario. Although it took the advent of digital video, years later, to eventually position time-based work as one of my chosen mediums.
In the past year I have collaborated with an Australian artist, Nien Schwarz on the making of two documentaries, both exhibited at Indian Ocean Triennial Australia, 24.
My most recent experimental self-portrait short film
is titled Pap.Pus available on Vimeo.
Walking is a space outside of time, well suited to reflection, meditation and new thought.
Walking is at the core of my art practise. Much of my work,
from about 2005 onward, has resulted from walks in nature.
I walk, make photographic notes, record sound and collect evidence of other creature cultures: shells, bones, nests, feathers, beaver-chewed willow, fur, a paw print.
In the studio these collections generate ideas for installations, video, sound designs, drawings and composite archival pigment prints.
Val David, QC, 2019
A Short Biography
I was born in Wales, UK. Soon after our family moved to the Sudan. First to Wadi Halfa and later to Khartoum. Our garden bordered the river at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile.
At age seven, we immigrated to Canada.
I have lived and worked all across Canada, including two summers above the Arctic Circle.
At age 39 I studied art foundation courses at Ottawa University. The following year I began part time BFA studies at the University of Victoria, graduating with honours in 1994. I completed an MFA at the University of Guelph in 1997.
I taught photography, video and visual communications, for 16 years, at Medicine Hat College, Medicine Hat, Alberta.
I now live in Regina, Saskatchewan and make work across Canada.
Calling all, Val David, Québec, 2018
An excerpt from the exhibition catalogue for Talisman
This morning, at first light, I watch as a summer breeze rustles the leaves in a tall poplar tree living at the edge of our garden. The neighbuorhood crows and jays are trading stories. In the distance, I can just make out the sounds of a locomotive, shunting cars in the rail yard. Olive, our black cat, brushes up beside me, softly. These small things, detected, form a first skin of understanding and often provoke new work. I walk, with dogs or sometimes alone through a coulee, a field or along the banks of the South Saskatchewan. A magpie's raspy call, coyote scat, a gnawed tree branch, these are all signs noticed, small evidences of our companion societies.
Talisman, digital composite photograph, 2015