| BiographicalHistory | Born on the Isle of White in 1945, David Dye was an artist, film maker and lecturer. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (c.1968-72), Goldsmith's College, London (1984-86) and was a senior lecturer in Sculpture at the University of Northumbria. His installations and films have been shown in a number of countries including, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Norway, France, America and Argentina. His work is held by the Arts Council, the National Trust, the Henry Moore Foundation and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Dye gained high profile exposure whilst still a student at St. Martin's School of Art, exhibiting at the 'Young Contemporaries' at the Royal Academy, London in 1970 and 'The British Avant-Garde' at the New York Cultural Center, New York in 1971. The works exhibited at these exhibitions were described as 'devices', mirrored pieces which manipulated the spectator’s position. According to Dye, the works developed from his "interest in the way that sculpture traditionally demanded different viewpoints, the way that the viewer moved around sculpture and in effect 'completed' their experience of the work" ('United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in 1960s & 1970s', The Henry Moore Institute, 2011). The location of the spectator was to be a recurrent theme throughout Dye’s career.
Whilst still a student, Dye started to incorporate film into his works, using it to strip images back to their most basic of components, free from artifice and illusion. His film works and performances attempted to subvert traditional film-making by focusing attention on the means of making the image, rather than the image itself. This focus was most fully articulated in works shown at Dye's solo exhibition of film and continuous performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London in April 1972, and the group exhibition 'The New Art' at the Hayward Gallery in August to September 1972. 'The New Art' exhibition in particular proved to be a pivotal show: it was the first major exhibition of British conceptual art and garnered high profile exposure for its exhibiting artists, many of whom studied and/or taught at St. Martin’s School of Art. Four of the exhibiting artists Gilbert & George, John Hilliard and Richard Long, were Dye's contemporaries at St. Martins.
After the success of 'The New Art' exhibition, Dye continued to focus on film-making, often using Super and standard 8mm film. His works, which usually had a performative element, became part of the British expanded cinema movement and were shown at film festivals and exhibitions throughout Europe. Works such as 'Mirror Film' (1971), 'Western Reversal' (1973) and 'Overlap' (1973) established Dye as a performance film artist, both nationally and internationally. By the mid-1970s, Dye started to make still versions of his film works and moved towards making more site-specific installations which incorporated 'found' film. Works such as 'Throwing Light On' (1976) and '3-D' (1978) also returned to his earlier interest in the position, both physically and ideologically, of the spectator. However, through Dye’s use of pornographic film, the spectator was implicated as a voyeur, rather than a benign observer.
By the early 1980s, Dye's interest in spectator 'viewing' manifested itself in the making of anamorphic works. Studio-based works such as 'Doorway Drawing' (1981) and 'Mirror Portrait for Camera' (1981) could only be viewed by means of an optical device and/or when viewed from a single viewpoint. Dye also experimented with incorporating pornographic imagery into these works, often in the form of gay pornography; but these works often remained experimental, rather than fully realised. During this period of experimentation, Dye was exhibiting less and by 1984 he embarked on an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College London. The two-year course saw Dye create perhaps his most painterly works to-date, painting heraldic imagery and motifs on layered pieces of wood.
Following the completion of his MA, Dye returned to making mirrored devices, culminating in a solo exhibition of sculpture and installation at The Showroom, London in 1990. The show featured a variety of angled mirrored works that subverted the action of viewing. The exhibition also featured the installation 'Steps', a work that had first been shown at the gallery in 1988. The installation, made from ultra violet light, string, paint, mirrors and black cloth, created the illusion of a solid staircase in a triangular space and was remade for the Cleveland Gallery, Middlesbrough in 1992 and Tullie House Museum, Carlisle in 1995.
The 1990s marked a period of making site-specific installations for various galleries, including 'The Big O' for Riverside Studios, London in 1991 and 'Ultra' for The Tannery, London in 1996. He also participated in four 'Divers Memories' exhibitions held in museums in England, Hong Kong and Finland (1994-1998). However, a renewed interest in the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in Dye’s early work and he was approached to remake and restage works for various retrospective exhibitions, including 'Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-1975’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 2000 and 'Expanded Cinema: Activating the space of reception' at the Tate Modern, London in 2009. In 2011 he undertook a month-long residency at Highbridge Studios, Newcastle making site-specific works. At the point of his death in January 2015, Dye was working on a major retrospective of his work at the Gallery North, Newcastle in 2015.
Throughout most of his artistic career, Dye retained a post in academia, taking on a part-time role as an associate lecturer at the Newcastle Polytechnic in 1979. In 1993, when the Polytechnic became the University of Northumbria, Dye took on a full-time post as senior lecturer. He maintained this role until 2010, when he left to complete a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Backwards into the Future: an exploration into revisiting, representing and rewriting art of the late 1960s and early 1970s' (University of Northumbria). Dye died unexpectedly in January 2015.
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| Description | The collection contains the papers of sculptor David Dye, including sketchbooks, drawings, films, presentation boards, photographs, negatives, project files, exhibition catalogues and correspondence. The collection is particularly abundant in material related to the first twenty years of his career and covers all aspects of his artistic practice, including sculpture, installation and film performance. His most prominent solo and joint exhibitions are represented in the archive, including 'The New Art', Hayward Gallery, 1972. Dye's time at St. Martin's School of Art is represented in the archives by presentation boards and photographs, but a separate accession of notebooks provides additional insight at his time at the school [see 2008.9]. The film content of the archive is rich in material related to his performance work, though Dye’s most celebrated film work, 'Mirror Film' (1971), is not represented in the collection. Dye's collection of presentation boards provides a comprehensive reflection of Dye’s career up to the 1980s and highlights his evolving artistic practices and concerns. |