BIO
David Freney-Mills creates a contemplative art inspired by evolutionary process in language, history, and consciousness. His abstract arrangements convey a sense of flux and transformation. Freney-Mills’ paintings are akin to organisms made up of accumulated layers and traces of decisions. His text-related shapes conjoined and overlapped, explore the idea that language too is an organism, with it’s own evolutionary possibilities, and can be used to expand consciousness, for example in the recitation of chants or mantras. In addition, the forms in his paintings evoke human presence, conveyed in essence as a sign or glyph. To the artist each one of us is a unique glyph flowing in a continuum of presence and language over time. This evocation of human presence can be seen in Freney-Mills’ HYPERGLYPH series, painted with ink on Korean Hanji paper. The painted Hanji is torn and cut into pieces that are playfully shifted around to explore possible compositions, then mounted onto canvas. During this process in the studio the childhood experience of play and being open to chance as an element of creativity is activated within the artist.
Freney-Mills’ main artistic influences are reductive abstraction as well as visual art traditions from the East Asian region; such as ink painting, calligraphy, textile dye art, and woodblock prints. David Freney-Mills is a Melbourne based artist, and currently works from his studio at the Hawthorn Arts Centre. Freney-Mills received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from RMIT University in 1994 and later completed a Post Graduate Diploma at Victorian College of the Arts in 2005. In 2019 he took part in the SUMUK Ink painting residency in Haenam, South Korea and exhibited there also. Freney-Mills has also exhibited widely in Melbourne, his most recent solo exhibition ‘HYPERGLYPH’ was held at Gallery Elysium. An earlier solo exhibition held in 2020 ‘A Reign of Green – Green Rain House’ at ACAE (Australasian Cultural Art Exchange) was a response to his time on residency in South Korea. He has work in both public and private collections in Australia, Europe and South Korea.
