David Alesworth
Bristol, UK and Lahore, Pakistan
David Alesworth (b.1957) is a Sculptor, photographer and researcher of garden history working between Lahore, Pakistan and Bristol, UK. 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 full-time 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.