David Alesworth

Born in 1957 in London (UK)
Lives and works between Lahore (Pakistan) and Bristol (UK)

David Alesworth is a Sculptor, photographer and researcher of garden history. Over the past decade his work has been predominately organized around ideas arising from the garden. However, this has been a very expanded ideation of the garden, more of the global forest of which we are all a part or as nature and culture than of the urban garden, but of course that too. He has visited the Botanical Garden as a concentration camp of exotic aliens, imprisoned in an act of cultural cleansing (Linz : 2007). The post-colonial garden in the video work “Joank” 2008, several public Botanical Interventions in Berlin, 2009-2010 and Botanical taxonomy in “The Garden of Babel” 2009. Also ideas of garden perfection in the textile works “Garden Palimpsest” 2010 and “Hyde Park, Kashan 1862” 2011, amongst others. He takes the garden as his key metaphor with which to probe humanity’s culturally specific relationships with the natural world and toward understanding nature more as a social problem. His own hybrid identity as a Pakistani National of White British ethnicity tends to inform most aspects of his current practice. Besides teaching in various Pakistani Art Schools and maintaining an active international art practice he has continued to work as a landscape designer and horticultural consultant in Pakistan for more than twenty-five years.

David Alesworth states of his “carpet intervention” on view at KB17: “A sense of place has been fundamental to my understanding of the world, the landscape and its living elements in particular. Over the last decade as an artist and researcher I've become more and more involved in issues of identity and post-coloniality. Lahore’s central city park known today as Bagh-e-Jinnah was formerly Lawrence Gardens and under the British Raj it was one of the numerous globe encircling Botanical gardens of Empire that were central to the British colonizing project. Initially intended as a garden of ‘acclimatization’ for English fruit trees and loosely based upon the design of Kew Gardens, Lawrence Gardens has continued to evolve through the intervening decades. The work is based upon a mapping of Lawrence Gardens from the 1970’s and the park and its broader environment are a veritable lab for the study of post-coloniality.”