David Cross is an artist, writer, curator and recently appointed Professor of Visual Arts at Deakin University (Melbourne). David has relocated to Melbourne after 15 years at Massey University in Wellington NZ where he was also co-curator of the massively successful One Day Sculpture event with UK curator, Claire Doherty. His work has been focussed on temporary public art, and in particular works that privilege haptic perception (non-verbal communication that involves touch) over the visual/sight senses. These works are large in scale and designed to activate sensory responses that wouldn’t normally be activated in artistic experiences. Other works developed for specific sites around the world have titles such as Hold, Lean, Drift, Pump—all words that infer an activity.

David is interested in sport and game structures that enable audience participation via a set of rules. These games or newly invented sports draw from his sculptural practice of large inflatable structures and spectacle as the mechanism to draw in community, getting them to play a game which is quite unique. David talks about his work as “a trade off between it being a participatory art work, an installation sculptural art work and something that offers genuine community engagement”

For the work Level Playing Field/Powerslide, two teams of six people compete against each other by trying to make it across the surface of the large inflatable field, while members of the other team work to undermine their stability by manipulating straps connected to the surface from underneath.

For Airds, David is working on a new work called Sky Blind—an extension of this concept of sport rules and how sport can be used to unfold some of the ideas around phobia, pleasure, risk and haptic engagement. The work involves three teams of four players in a new sport involving a large net, a highly propelled ball and the players running while one of them yells instructions to the team member who is prevented from seeing because of the inflatable pod like costume they are wearing. Sound like fun?

David will be in Airds at the beginning of May to check out the site and meet with members of the community:

“I’ve only spent two days there so I need to get back to the community and meet more people and have more conversations about how we might want to progress; hopefully we will be able to get an established competition for the two days so we will have a grand final. It’s going to look crazy and absurd but it needs to function as a sport.”