Dave St. Clair Morgan

Vodnjan / Astra / 19 / 9 / 2025 / 19:00 / Exhibition

Spoon/Tree (2025.) Hand-carved recycled Skate­board Decks.

Hav­ing stud­ied sculp­ture in Manchester pre­vi­ous to liv­ing in Ber­lin, my prac­tice has pre­dom­in­antly focused on the nat­ur­al 3‑dimensional ele­ments with­in art. With roots in tra­di­tion­al wood carving and glass-work, and a strong appre­ci­ation of craft, my approach to mak­ing work has always held an eco­lo­gic­al inten­tion. Be it an inter­ven­tion with a land­scape, or the recyc­ling of a com­monly-used mater­i­al, giv­ing it a second life in an unortho­dox scenario.

Spoons are a funny thing to obsess over. Some­thing so ordin­ary, used so reg­u­larly and often dis­reg­arded as sheer cut­lery. How­ever, what if one removes its nor­mal functionality?

To place it in a dif­fer­ent scen­ario and change the com­monly under­stood form. It is no longer what we asso­ci­ate a spoon to be. A spoon becomes a sculp­ture. This is the focus of this body of work — see­ing how far from the com­mon­er-garden met­al utensil in one’s cut­lery draw a spoon can be. Sus­pend­ing the spoons from their source mater­i­al cre­ates a full circle moment. Imprac­tic­al, almost impossible at times, but always visu­ally retain­ing its ori­gin­al use, albeit in a for­eign environment.

- Dave St. Clair Morgan