Dave Sherry | Bio 2025
Dave Sherry b. 1974, Northern Ireland. Lives in Glasgow. My work includes performance, drawing, video, and sculpture. I am interested in making artworks that relate strongly to everyday life. Developing visual props and narratives for live work. I am influenced by social interaction and observing ordinary behavior. Many everyday interactions become a source for my work. Drawing and writing is an important part of my studio practice, for generating ideas and visualizing performances. Live performance gives expression to my ideas, incorporating a variety of themes and methods. Developing new possibilities for performance is a driving influence. My studio practice interests encompass: routines, pattern of social expectation, etiquette, humor in art / stand-up comedy, politics and environmentalism. Dave Sherry graduated with an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2000 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Ulster Belfast in 1997. He will show with Videocity in Odessa at the Museum of Modern Art Ukraine, 2025. Rex Box Bern and Bern Art School, 2025. He will make a multi video project at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Feb 2026. In 2024 he performed at P-ART-Y Kristiansand Norway, Performance Festival. Recent projects include a performances at The Old Hairdressers Glasgow, 2024. Voices in Buildings, Edinburgh, 2024. Stereo Glasgow, 2024. The Revelator research symposium Glasgow, 2024. Art Night Dundee 2023. A series of performances at IMMA Dublin, for outdoors, 2023. In 2022 he was commissioned by De Warande Belgium, to make a new performance film. In 2021 he was award a Climate Change Commission by Scene Stirling. In May 2020 he undertook a residency at Findhorn Bay Arts. Recent exhibitions at The Hilbert Raum Berlin and The Golden Thread Belfast for the Belfast International Festival 2019. Performance, Das Dritte Land, Kulturforum Berlin at the Korean Garden, 2019. Recent performances at : Art Late Edinburgh Art Festival, Platform Arts Glasgow for Outskirts, Look Again Festival in Aberdeen. In 2016 he showed at the Liverpool Biennial and Manifesta 11. De Player Rotterdam and Het Bos Antwerp 2017 Solo exhibitions at Outpost Norwich, Summerhall Edinburgh, Catalyst Arts Belfast; Villa Concordia Bamberg Germany, Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Jack Hanley San Francisco 2005 and Tramway. Selected group exhibitions including ‘Generation’ at the Kelvingrove Glasgow, ‘RIFF’ Baltic 39 Newcastle, Film and video at BBC Scotland, ‘Grin and Bear It’ at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork and ‘One fine morning in May’ at GAK Bremen. In 2003, he was selected to represent Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale and his work is held in many collections including the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art.
Outskirts, at Platform Glasgow. Reviewed by David Pollock in the Scotsman.
Monday 29 April.
Northern Irish, Glasgow-based artist David Sherry (****) was the penultimate performer, although what his job description might allow him to call a performance art piece was more of a stand-up comedy set – an extremely funny one, albeit with a particularly highbrow frame of reference, so well-suited to the crowd here. He touched upon Brexit (pointing out that the 8,000 referendum voters who marked ‘don’t know’ on their ballots were visionaries), the financial system and the nature of identity itself.
Review of Outskirts by Brian Beadie for werk.re
Light relief comes courtesy of David Sherry, a Northern Irish performance artist working in Glasgow who’s been responsible for some of the wackiest, actual LOL inducing work I’ve seen in the field. Tonight he embarks on a stream of consciousness monologue crossing from bookshops to Brexit to the state of the economy, aided by some of his trademark absurdist props, such as a Spiral of Downward Mobility and a Brexit map of Europe wind instrument. Halfway through, he sticks his head in a crash helmet while a guy comes over of the audience and beats him on the head with a bat. As you do. It culminates with Sherry smashing out a poem on a keyboard with a hammer, shards of plastic flying into the audience. The poem is gibberish; the routine is brilliant.
Neil Mulholland - Open Frequency.
David Sherry's work is a comedy of manners composed with the lightest of touches - by doing as little as possible he always seems to be on the verge of a great anthropological revelation. He initially came to public attention for performance works that satirise the machismo of 70s live art. A video featuring Sherry sewing pieces of balsa wood to his feet, 'Stitching' (2001) is typically underplayed, filmed in a blase how-to fashion, domesticating the masculine bravado of self-mutilation performance with a vulnerability that is more Delia Smith than Evil Knievel. Sherry's performances nevertheless share the deadpan character of Chris Burden's, his comparable descriptive tone belying a sharp observational wit and a rigorous self-editing process that belies canonical live art.
'Carrying a Bucket of Water About for a Week' involved doing precisely this. Sherry negotiated the routine aspects of daily life, walking down the street, going to the shops, getting on the bus, going to work, going down the pub, all carrying a bucket filled with water. To those who noticed this activity, Sherry was either an obsessive compulsive or a window cleaner. For all this might constitute a repeated and unchanged routine it was oddly exceptional, a notable rupture in the activities of the city, albeit one that was deliberately understated. The activity acts as a means of unifying the allegedly separate spheres of regulated work and the unregulated world of play, since play, or making art, is Sherry's job. Its difficult to imagine this as a fervent act of dissent, Sherry doesn't offer any crude agitational catharsis, manifesto for cultural renewal or hot tips for political emancipation, rather he develops something closer to a social crisis that stops short of a genuine breakdown - all the hallmarks of great black humour.
Sherry's performances, in this sense, subtly test the patience and sympathies of the general public who witness them and as such allow him to examine the limits of the social contract. In many of his works his deliberately half-hearted effort to dissent from social codes can transgress gently into the anti-social. 'Avoiding Eye Contact for One Seven Day Period' (2003) and 'I Haven't Touched Another Person in Months' (2003) play with social decorum, blatantly practicing bad manners yet hardly in a way worthy of an ASBO. Sherry has also adopted the opposite tactic, being Confrontationally Polite to shopkeepers by thanking them for a prolonged period of time. As part of October, an ambient public art event organised by the Glasgow Project Room in St. Vincent Street, the busy business district in Glasgow, Sherry dressed as a woman he knows who suffers from a degenerative mental illness. Resembling Norman Bates clothed as his mother, he stood quietly behind a partially opened doorway grinning at passers by. There was no way of guessing the purpose of this activity, it could have been done for a bet, for charity or as a genuine cry for help. 'Advancement into Retreat' received varied reactions ranging from supportive and encouraging to obstreperous and goading. At times Sherry became the focal point in the battleground for public space, as builders on a nearby site guarded him from the unwanted attentions of young hooligans.
There's the encouraging thought that underachievement can be glorious and disappointment a thing of beauty as we witness Sherry attempting to run for buses he can't catch ('Running for the Bus'), buying all the rolos in the shop ('No Rolo'), applying for inappropriate jobs ('Serial Psycho Interviewee' 2002-03), spending the run up to Christmas watching TV while eating biscuits and drinking tea in a music shop window in a busy shopping street, or waiting around in shops after 'Being Asked to Leave'. Perhaps Sherry has finally discovered the wonder cure for schadenfreude.
Neil Mulholland, 2007.