David Godbold is an artist working with drawing, painting and mixed media to scrutinise the production, circulation and reception of imagery across high and low culture. He uses motifs from a medley of sources, including old master painting, religious icons, children’s colouring books, comics and satirical cartoons, mining the history of visual culture for imagery that feels familiar and yet wholly out-of-ordinary in their new context. Godbold overlays these fragments with daubs of paint, graffiti-like scrawlings or snippets of text, creating chatty palimpsests: text/images that juxtapose antiquated imagery – ink drawings or woodcut-style illustrations – with irreverent, comical or contemplative captions. His works vary from large-scale canvases to small, irreverent works on discarded pieces of paper: receipts, tickets, or shopping lists. Transforming the flotsam of everyday existence into works of art and vice versa, Godbold desanctifies the holy and elevates the ephemeral. As well as its cutting humour, his work is marked by its philosophical awareness, underpinned by the artist’s PhD research; beauty and wonder; and a sense of humility in the face of history.
David Godbold lives and works in Dublin.
