biography

Born England 1961. Arrived Australia 1987.
Completed an Honours degree in Sculpture in the UK and an MVA in Australia. He currently practices and teaches in South Australia. Dady has had fifteen solo exhibitions, numerous Group Exhibitions as well as developing performance, site specific projects and collaborative works. Dady has received Art Direction and Production Design awards in Film and has undertaken major Public Sculpture and Design Commissions. In 2001 he was awarded the Australia Council London Studio residency and awarded a mid career fellowship by Arts SA. In 2006 he was awarded the Australia Council, Rome studio residency.

Statement notes

A series of works in 3 dimensions that treat the ‘propositional’ state as a poetic space.
I’m interested in the place where things/objects are thought about, designed and imagined. A propositional state of human intension that lies just off shore from a more concrete result.
Cardboard objects that are in a critical conversation with the ground. The relationship with the ground, whether it is a struggle, acquiescent or structurally optimal, is always under the insistence of gravity.

The cardboard is lovely for it’s honesty. It is capable of so much structurally and fails with a flourish. As a material it is already optimal; its enormous strength derived from acutely engineered paper. The strength has to be very focused, very rigid, in one direction and malleable in another.
It is this quality of ‘just so’ that makes it such an excellent yet temporary material.
Cardboard occupies the world of transition…. transport of something else, mock-up of something else, a vehicle for proposition. Except in a few design related instances, cardboard rarely occupies ‘object hood’ in a ‘permanent’, concrete sense.



These objects are propositional, existing in a half drawn, half made state. Without intending to give them undue majesty, they function as ‘made things’ and that is their only role. Carried with this is ‘intension’ and even ‘desire’.

These are evidences, small or large acts of a human type, intelligent or dumb.

Work that enjoys the state of being propositional. The work is always in anticipation of a future state, but that state is only important in that it is usual for a proposition to have one.

An idea manifest. Not illustrative or particularly documented in time. No, something that stands more like a newborn Foal, just, and only just, damp and quivering, having no experience of existence.