Playing with Process – Davide La | CYD #13 – Nosakhari

Sculptor Davide La has always been fascinated with playing around with materials. As a child, he would take apart appliances with fascination just to see what was inside, and now much of his work involves the opposite – the fusion of materials and shapes in woodwork and welding.

Without an end goal or preconception, Davide begins his pieces organically, playing with the materials until a question – on aesthetic or functional capability – forms and is answered by the completion of the sculpture. His art is heavily invested in the space it is showcased in, interacting physically with its surroundings or reacting thematically.

Growing up in Singapore, Davide was regularly exposed to the construction sites, machine equipment and raw materials common in an expanding city, and these formative influences have framed his perspective on contemporary sculpture as expressive of a continuing interest in the manipulation of the man-made. That’s not to say that his art is not personal, however – the struggle to harness a material’s inner qualities and the spontaneity of his artistic process, which he likens to “cutting and pasting” on a computer, is reflective of the curiosity at the heart of his drive to create in the first place. This curiosity and the desire to innovate is a defining characteristic of Davide creative story and his work: we know how powerful that drive is – it’s behind each Nosakhari collection, too.