David James Grinly
Two collections: Revival and
Revolt
Painted photographs of walls taken in Alva and Paris
David James Grinly is an artist based in Edinburgh. His practice encompasses photography, writing, and painting. He describes his work as “devotional.”
David works as a lecturer/researcher in critical studies and philosophy and is currently studying psychoanalysis at CFAR in London. His work has been shown and is collected nationally and internationally, and he has published several short books and photobooks.
David takes many years to complete projects and shies away from institutional and commercial approaches to artistic production and exhibition. The collection available here offers a rare opportunity to buy some of this reclusive artist’s beguiling work.
“I don’t take the pictures or even make them - I use the camera to record pictures of things, and that’s all, really.”
“I gather the photos - not as evidence, rather as a tool. The photographs aren’t the tool; I am the tool; I act as a collection tool.
And I collect them by, in a sense, not-photographing - I just gather things, photographically. I don’t take the pictures or even make them - I use the camera to record pictures of things, and that’s all, really. I photograph the things which are still waiting, which have been left there, by God perhaps? Perhaps they are meaningful to other people as such, or perhaps they are not. They aren’t revealed to me in a dazzling ray of light or anything like that; they are not ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’, they are ordinary in the ordinary. Things merely appear in an unconcealed way, like an accumulation of unforgotten objects, like Astolfo found on his adventure to the moon.”