David Chesworth

Chesworth’s work focuses on the social in human experience, emphasizing shared cultural spaces - how music and sounds of diverse nature interact with cultural memory and performative contexts. The direct appeal of his musical surfaces, his collaborative working methods, and the implicit critique of traditional boundaries between genres, academic and popular subcultures, and between art forms in his music and art can provoke audiences who adhere to musical styles and genres.

Chesworth's creative output includes music, sound art, video, installation and performance, often in collaboration with other artists. His compositions and installations have been exhibited and performed at Ars Electronica, Festival d'automne à Paris, Edinburgh Festival, BAM's Next Wave Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Sydney Biennale and the Venice Biennale. In 2012 he was artist in residence at the MONA Festival of Art and Music in Hobart which featured performances by the David Chesworth Ensemble and the showing of several of installation artworks made with collaborator Sonia Leber.

Chesworth and Leber collaborated with Simeon Nelson on Proximities, a 2006 Commonwealth Games public sound-art commission for William Barak Bridge in Melbourne and Oceanic Endless for Melbourne's Cardinia Council in 2007. Dyad, a Leber/Chesworth/Nelson proposal was shortlisted for the 2012 London Olympic Park bridges commission.

Experimental Performance: Chesworth's interest in exploring wider extra-musical contexts has led to his involvement with performance artworks and experimental opera. Insatiable, was completed in 1986. Since then he has worked with Melbourne's Chamber Made Opera (Recital, The Two Executioners and Lacuna), and with the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Cosmonaut, commissioned by Opera Australia, and Sabat Jesus). In 2010 Chesworth created the performance artwork Richter/Meinhof-Opera which was presented at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for the 2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival and at the Art Gallery of NSW. The CD Wicked Voice containing material from various productions was released on ABC Classics.

Early in his career Chesworth coordinated the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in Melbourne, a centre for experimental music, performance, film and video. He performed extensively in the late 1970s and early ‘80s as a solo performer and with post-punk group Essendon Airport. Through Innocent Records, a label he co-founded with Philip Brophy, he released several solo records that playfully deconstruct cultural tropes, including 50 Synthesizer Greats and Layer on Layer, and with the group Essendon Airport - Sonic Investigations of the Trivial and Palimpsest, and with Whadya Want? - Skippy Knows. These have been reissued on CD or vinyl.

He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Chesworth's parents moved the family from Britain to Melbourne, Australia in the late 1960s. Chesworth studied at La Trobe University, including time with composer's Jeff Pressing, Warren Burt and Graham Hair. He was recently awarded a doctorate in Philosophy at Monash University, for which he was awarded the Mollie Holeman Medal for research excellence. He is currently a Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at RMIT University. He lives in Melbourne in partnership with Sonia Leber. They are directors of the company Wax Sound Media and have one daughter.

David Chesworth (born 1958, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom) is an Australian-based interdisciplinary artist and composer. Known for his experimental and at times minimalist music, he has worked solo, in post-punk groups (Essendon Airport, Whadya Want?), electronic music, contemporary ensembles and experimental performance. Together with Sonia Leber, Chesworth has created a series of large scale installation and video artworks, such as Zaum Tractor included in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and This Is Before We Disappear From View commissioned by Sydney Biennale (2014).