david annand

`Nae Day Sae Dark` in Perth High Street is one of Annand`s best known pieces. This powerful testimony to the work of the poet William Soutar shows the potential of his technical and aesthetic experience. It answers the demanding criteria of public-art, thus combining heavy engineering, street furniture, local history, poetry, even irony and despair. As a composition it is as tight as the poem itself and equally accessible; important factors in both their philosophies.
"My work has grown out of a tradition of figurative representation exploiting the plasticity of clay. It deals with vitality, balance, gravity and irony. It is very important that my work should remain accessible to everyone i.e. realistic human or animal subjects, observed and modelled with discipline, set in a slightly incongruous composition, using the site as a plinth and often involving an abstract element in the composition. Think of a Richard Thompson song. It can be sentimental or traditional but then it is spiked with a guitar solo that is so abstract it is at the very edge of the genre. I wish I could achieve this in my sculpture. Everything is abstract. Looking back at my sculpture you`d think I am obsessed with giving gravity a hard time and taking my materials to the limit. It`s easy enough to make life-like sculptures, but, by nudging them off balance, in an awkward place - it makes them vulnerable, precarious; they get an urgency to be alive.".