BoysCraft

Daniel Silver

Alongside the sculptural works he creates in various materials, Daniel Silver has recently begun embroidering needlepoint works, which he integrates into his sculptures and installations. Needlepoint is located low in the hierarchy of handicrafts, and is usually associated with decadent conservatism and with bad taste. The readymade needlepoint canvases that Silver purchases in craft stores are characterized by popular romantic images. Silver intervenes in these compositions, adds and changes the forms and colors, creates collages out of various needlepoint designs and violently disrupts the decorative scenes. He subsequently places these transformed decorative clichés alongside and within his sculptures. The placement of these "decorative elements" upon the sculptural envelope effaces the hierarchies between "high" and "low" and between acceptable and despised practices, to the point where the modernist syntax of his sculptures seems to lovingly accept the foreign images grafted onto it.

Born in London, 1972; lives and works in London