Charles Danby has been working collaboratively with artist Rob Smith since 2011. Their work explores site and land use in the transforming industrial landscape of the UK. It draws on histories and legacies of British Land Art practices, exploring new approaches to site-based contemporary art making within the material and digital environments of bordered land sites such as quarries, islands, forests, and national parks. Their works use video, photography, social practice and digital technologies, increasingly moving into VR, alongside curatorial and archival approaches. Works and projects investigate the forming and becoming of site as time-based event structures through human, other than human, ecological and geological actions. It presents a fluid ‘distributed’ model of site that extends through time, scale and location, proposing plural possibilities of new human and material relationships and representations beyond site/non-site.
Charles Danby studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and is a member of NEUSCHLOSS, a group pursuing progressive gestures in exhibition making, arts pedagogy and archival futures. Projects include Das Trauman at Baltic (2015) and The Place of Dead Rhoades (2015). He was editor of Tate Tanks Programme Notes (2012) for Tate, London. Recent curatorial projects include Animated Environments at Siobhan Davies Studios (2011-12), Epilogues: It Started With A Car Crash at IMT Gallery (2011), and Grand National – Art From Britain at Vestfossen Kunstlaboritorium, Norway (2010).
Website: http://danbysmith.com/
Forthcoming book:
http://www.dpr-barcelona.com/index.php?/ongoing/anthropocene/