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Danville Chadbourne, Texas Sculpture Group

From San Antonio, Texas

Artist Statement

My work is concerned with evoking spiritual or primal states. I use simple organic forms in suggestive conjunctions that elaborate on metaphorical issues of ambiguity, morality, accident/intention, contradiction, or existence itself. The body of work is unified by a very personal primal iconography and artifact-like quality that emerges from a consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense. I’m interested in the intellectual speculation we make about other cultures, especially primitive or ancient ones, based on observation of their artifacts. My forms, materials, and processes imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time. Clay has associative power archeologically, it responds well to the expressive needs of my ideas and is relatively permanent.  Wood, stone, fiber, bone, and found objects also have connotative powers. There is often an allusion to circumstance, contextual or ritual usage, and time, but in a peripheral, indirect, or generalized way. The works seem interrelated, part of some culture with an elaborate but undefined mythological structure. This anthropological perception is a key issue in my work.

Artist Biography

Danville Chadbourne (b. 1949, Bryan, TX) is an American sculptor who works in a range of materials and formats, unified by a distinctive handling of forms and primal symbol imagery. He earned a BFA in 1971 from Sam Houston State University and an MFA 1973 Texas Tech University. After teaching studio art and art history at the college level for 17 years at various institutions, Chadbourne quit teaching 1989 to devote himself full-time to his art. He has exhibited extensively at both state and national levels, including more than 100 one-person exhibitions. His work is included in numerous private and public collections. Chadbourne’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly, and The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2016). International residencies include ArtSpace India in Calcutta, India and Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. Chadbourne has been the recipient of the Dozier Travel Grant and, in 2019, was awarded the prestigious Individual Artist Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Chadbourne works in a range of materials and in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Over the years he has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography and artifact-like quality emerging from a very personal and consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense. He has lived in San Antonio, Texas since 1979.