David Gates
A winner of the Jerwood Award for Contemporary Making 2010 Gates’s practice draws together a multi-stranded approach to design and making. His furniture embraces functional expediency as well as exploring our relationship with the stuff around us. Carefully made bespoke cabinet-work and tables sit alongside rapidly made, seemingly functionless, intuited pieces, at a distance yet connected. It at once both celebrates and interrogates making techniques, neither fetishising nor negating either hand or machine. Gates is a founder member of the collective, Intelligent Trouble, a cross-disciplinary project exploring social production. His M/Phil PhD research at Kings College London focuses on the situated language of craft practice and he is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University. Recent exhibitions include; Taking Time; Craft and the Slow Revolution, (2009-11) Intelligent Trouble at Contemporary Applied Arts (2010), Jerwood Contemporary Makers, (2010-11), Starting Points at the Siobhan Davies Dance Studios (2010) and Host, San Francisco (2011).
Born 1966
Education
2008- Kings College London, MPhil./PhD. Research student
1984-1988 Ravensbourne College of Art & Design. Furniture and Product Design.
1984-1985 Art Foundation Course, Ravensbourne College of Art and Design
Awards
2010 Winner, Jerwood Award for Contemporary Making
2006 Wesley Barrell Craft Award for Established Makers, Highly commended runner-up.
1988 New Designers. Winner of lighting design award.
1988 Awarded Royal Society of Arts and Department of Trade and Industry Bursary
Teaching
2002-Pres London Met University. Senior Lecturer 3D Design (Furniture design and craft)
2002 Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication
Lead Tutor of 3D pathway, Art and Design.
Selected exhibitions
2011 COLLECT, Saatchi Gallery, with New Brewery Arts.
2011 HOST, Velvet da Vinci, San Francisco. Curation and participation, an installation of collaborative making.
2010 Smiths Row Gallery, Intelligent Trouble, Under The Counter, Jewellery in Conversation
2010 Manchester Metropolitan University.
Pairings- A Conversation, and touring
2010 Siobhan Davies Studios, London. Starting Points
2010 Jerwood Contemporary Makers, Jerwood Space, London, and touring to March 2011
Naughton Gallery Belfast, Innovative Crafts Edinburgh and National Gallery of Craft, Kilkenny
2010 Contemporary Applied Arts, London
Intelligent Trouble; A Curious Exchange..
2009-2011 Birmingham City Art Gallery then touring, Taking Time; Craft and the Slow Revolution.
2009 Waterperry, Oxfordshire, Art in Action.
Contemporary Applied Arts, London, Focus.
2008 Somerset House, London, Origin.
Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk; Group show.
West Dean Craft Gallery, Chichester, Effervescence.
2007 Collect, V&A Museum, London
Effervescence, West Dean Crafts Gallery, Chichister
Origin, Somerset House, London
2006 Lesley Craze Gallery, Clerkenwell, London
Wesley Barrell Craft Award feature at Origin, Somerset House, London
2004 Cut & Paste, HUB centre for craft, design & making, Sleaford.
Selected for ‘Grassimesse’ Leipzig
2003 Flow Gallery, London. Joint show with Helen Carnac.
2002 ‘Still’. Applied Arts Agency London
2001 Group show, St Pancreas Chambers, Grand Midland Hotel
‘Inside Out II’ Flow London
2000 Sotheby’s contemporary crafts, collaboration with textile designer Hikaru Noguchi
Selected Commissions
2007 Paget School, Birmingham. Design and make furniture for an inter-diciplinary reconfiguration of part of the school building collaborating with architectural, metal and colour specialists. A Creative Partnerships project with Craftspace
2006 St. Botolphs Church, Aldgate, London. Design, production & instatllation of display system for ‘Heirlooms’ exhibition, curated by Elizabeth Callinicos for the Association of Contemporary Jewellery.
2005 Bilston Craft Gallery, Wolverhampton. Design and making of nine pieces of furniture including a reading table and benches for a newly created public area. This was a collaboration with Helen Carnac.
2003-2004 St, Giles Church, Farnborough, Kent. Grade II listed building partly dating from the middle ages. Design and manufacture of cabinetwork and fittings to two vestries including robe storage for the choir and creation of office area for the clergy.
2002 University of Westminster, School of the Built Environment. Boardroom furniture: table, credenzas and chairs designed with John Miller and manufactured by myself.
Research and esteem.
I am the convener of a cross-disciplinary university research group called Practice & Voice whose members’ aims are to find appropriate ways of articulating and disseminating the doing of craft practice. From 2006 until 2009 I sat on the selection and interview panel of the Crafts Council’s Development Award as the furniture specialist, I have also worked with the Crafts Council on their Next Move scheme. As part of the build up to the Taking Time exhibition I participated as panel member at a debate on the subject at the Royal Festival Hall London. A paper that I gave at the 2007 conference, New Craft Future Voices was later broadcast on Resonance FM who also interviewed me for their Clear Spot programme. I gave a short paper at the Association of Contemporary Jewellery conference Carry the Can. I am a member of Contemporary Applied Arts and Design Nation.