Dave Ball (b.1978, UK) is an artist based in Berlin and Wales.

He studied at Goldsmiths College, London (MA) and the University of Derby, UK (BA). His work explores absurdity, irrationality and the interaction between sense and non-sense. It asks: how are our rational understandings of the world constructed? What are the consequences of these rational structures? In what ways can it be productive to deliberately avoid rationality? And what alternative understandings of the world can be generated through absurd practices? He often uses humour as a way of exploring these ideas, and his work is generally characterised by a philosophical playfulness. Ball works in video, performance, drawing, and photography, and has worked on participatory projects in collaboration with artists and experts from other fields.
Ball has shown widely at venues including Oriel Mostyn, Wales; Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdansk; NGBK, Berlin; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Iniva, London; Atelier 35, Bucharest; and Ha Gamle Prestegard, Norway. Residencies include Est-Nord-Est, Quebec, Canada; Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany; and Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales.
www.daveballartist.co.uk

Interview Berlin Artparasites
 

A total work of art? The idea of Gesamtkunstwerk is indeed ambitious and ground-breaking, but it's still current. Dave Ball is working to conform a whole piece of art by visually representing words in alphabetic order as they appear in the dictionary. The young English artist has dedicated himself intensively throughout the past two years to complete the first part of a lifelong project: to draw – with some restrictions – the entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Every word starting with the letter “A” is currently on display at Art Claims Impulse. Featuring over four hundred works, "A to Z: From Aardvark to Axle" is a collection of drawings and prints that hang frameless in three separate rooms. We sought the artist so he could give us some As to our Qs.


Ball wrote a manifesto with certain rules to narrow the infinite spectrum of words as he began his quest. “How many words are there? When you look at a dictionary, that’s the first thing you want to know. The answer is: there’s no answer. Dictionaries are all arbitrary selections. The most complete English dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary, has at the moment two million words and every year it grows and grows. So probably it is a pragmatic thing: I can’t make two million drawings. I chose the Concise Oxford Dictionary completely randomly – it was on my desk.”

Excerpt

Article by Sofía Martinelli

 

 Artworks

 A to Z: From Aardvark to Axle 

'A to Z' is an ongoing series of projects based on the premise of making a visualisation for every noun listed in the Concise Oxford English dictionary, starting at "A", and proceeding in alphabetical order. The opening project, 'From Aardvark to Axle' is to make a drawing for each of the approximately 460 "A" words

View sequence of 100 drawings from “animation” to “aridity”.

      




“A to Z: From Aardvark to Axle” | 466 Drawings various size | 2013 | Installation


The ‘A to Z’ project is clearly absurd, but it also represents a serious attempt to systematically account for what makes up our world. It challenges the notion that some things are more important than others, and instead treats everything within a language equally.

While the conceptual parameters of the project are strictly defined, within this framework there is considerable room for exploration, association, play, and inventiveness. For example, the choice of image which best represents a word must be chosen from an almost infinite number of possibilities; some are straightforward illustrations of objects: for example, “apple” is represented by a drawing of an apple from life. Others require more imaginative leaps: for example “appearance” is represented by a sequence of drawings of a magician conjuring up a white dove. Other, more abstract, words often rely on particular concrete manifestations: for example “annihilation” is represented by a drawing based on a well-known photograph of the mushroom cloud caused by the Nagasaki atomic bomb.

In part the project stems from the basic question: what should an artist take as their subject-matter? Right from the very first week of art school, this question bothered me intensely. Fellow students made work about their personal hang-ups or life story; others used existing artists or styles as their starting point; still others explored the formal concerns of their chosen medium. But I wanted to make art about the world. The trouble was, the world was frustratingly large and complex – where could I possibly begin?

The scale of the project seems ridiculous – but dictionaries and encyclopedias have been written by individuals in the past. In the age of Enlightenment it was seen as a necessary and achievable project to catalogue and understand everything in the world: the scope of knowledge was more or less graspable by single scholars.

But that has all changed: nobody could now claim such authority. There is simply too much to know. And yet, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, knowledge has become so much more accessible. The information is all there; the only problem is what to do with it. With this project, I have decided to respond to everything in the world visually, starting at the beginning of the alphabet, and continuing from there.

A lifetime undertaking, ‘A to Z’ represents a continuation of my explorations into themes of absurdity, subjective interaction with everyday environment, and the construction of rational knowledge.
Dave Ball

brandy

479 drawings for each of the 479 “B”-words, produced without the use of any visual source material (i.e. made entirely from memory); various media on paper, each 297 x 210mm.

Second project in the A to Z series of projects (2011-ongoing) based on the premise of making a visualisation for every word listed in the Concise Oxford English dictionary, starting at “A”, and proceeding in alphabetical order.

View sequence of 100 drawings from “blizzard” to “bravado”.

 "C"

831 photographs for each of the 831 “C”-words in the dictionary; dimensions variable.

View sequence of 100 photographs from “cab” to “carcinogen”.
Click on any "C" image to view the sequence.

Third project in the A to Z series of projects (2011-ongoing) based on the premise of making a visualisation for every word listed in the
Concise Oxford English dictionary, starting at “A”, and proceeding in alphabetical order.

The Ds (Blind Drawings)  2018‑ongoing

 Watch here the Interview with many D's in the studio.

The supremacy of Thought (The Ineffectiveness of Action)