DAVID
CUSHING
Artist · Sculptor · Creative Leader
objects
environments
stories for public discourse
I create objects and experiences that explore how people see themselves, one another and the world around them.
My practice moves between sculpture, public-space concepts and large-scale experiential design—using form, story, technology and place to create work that invites attention, participation and conversation.
Sculpture · Identity · Virtual Culture
SHUDU
déjà-vous?
SHUDU déjà-vous? explores the increasingly uncertain boundary between the virtual and the corporeal. It is a piece that is meant to feel "familiar" at the same time.
Inspired in part by the visual language of Nefertiti, the sculpture responds to SHUDUgram — a virtual fashion figure who exists entirely through digital imagery yet participates in contemporary culture as an influential representation of beauty, fashion and identity.
What happens when the virtual becomes physical?
By translating a person who does not physically exist into a tangible sculptural object, the work asks a question that public discourse will increasingly have to answer.
SCULPTURE · MOVEMENT · REPRESENTATION
DIVERSITY
of SPORT
Diversity of Sport explores movement, strength, representation and the tradition of monumentalizing the human body through sport.
Conceived as Los Angeles prepares to welcome the world for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the work considers how contemporary public sculpture can reflect a broader and continually evolving understanding of who participates, who is represented and who occupies civic space.
The concept expands beyond a single figure into the possibility of a public sculpture garden — multiple athletes, bodies and disciplines creating a collective portrait of sport.
PUBLIC ART · SUSTAINABILITY · EDUCATION
PLANT GREEN
IDEAS
Plant Green Ideas was conceived as a public-art intervention centered on sustainability, environmental awareness and public education.
The work uses humor, visual surprise and familiar urban language to interrupt the everyday landscape and invite people to reconsider their relationship to the environment.
Rather than treating sustainability as an instruction, the project uses art to make the subject visible, approachable and part of public conversation.
I’m interested in public art as more than an object placed in space. At its best, it can create curiosity, communicate ideas and turn an ordinary encounter into a moment of awareness.
New to public art.
Not new to scale.
My practice has increasingly moved toward sculpture and the public realm, but the disciplines required to create ambitious public work have been central to my career for decades — architecture, fabrication, storytelling, technology, complex stakeholders, significant budgets and large audiences.
This experience informs the way I approach public art: not simply as an object, but as something that exists within architecture, community, movement and human experience.
Selected Large-Scale Work
PRODUCTION DESIGN · CREATIVE LEADERSHIP · INTERNATIONAL SCALE
EUROVISION
Confluence of Sound
Production Designer
For the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest, David served as Production Designer, developing a stage concept titled Confluence of Sound. The design explored the convergence of music, culture, technology and spectacle at an extraordinary broadcast scale. (Larger viewing audience than the Oscars or Super Bowl.)
The phrase Confluence of Sound, originally developed as the name of the design concept, ultimately became the name used for the overall show.
KINETIC DEISGN · TEHCNOLOGY · AUDIENCE INTERACTION
MEDIA in MOTION
Production Designer · Producer · Show Director
For a touring exhibit booth, this was a large-scale kinetic environment integrating physical movement, technology, media, live performance and audience interaction.
The project required the client story, engineering, production and show direction to work as a single system — an approach that continues to inform how I think about truly ambitious projects for public engagement.
STEWARDSHIP · COMPLEXITY · DIGITAL CONTENT
SPACE the NEXT FRONTIER
CLIENT ADVOCATE · PRODUCTION DESIGNER · PRODUCER
Collaborating with DARPA – translating futurist and complex ideas into a physical experience requires more than design.
It requires understanding the client, the audience, the technology, the constraints and the purpose of the environment — and then protecting the focal creative idea as all of those forces come together.
My role combined exhibit design, media production, producing and client advocacy: helping turn sophisticated technical subject matter into an environment people could engage with and better understand.
ARCHITECTURE · MOVEMENT · AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR
ROCK and ROLL-ing
CREATIVE LEAD · PRODUCTION DESIGNER
Before the main event, the audience entered the environment – the stage hidden. The first beat of the launch was to drop a 120’ wide by 36’ tall Kabuki. While they gather and wait, what is the audience experience?
The challenge was not simply aesthetic. It was behavioral:
Where should people look? Where should they gather? What tells them that something is about to happen?
This mobile DJ environment became the initial architectural focal point — creating energy and orientation during arrival before physically moving to its final position as the larger experience was revealed.
WHY PUBLIC ART?
I am interested in art that has to negotiate with the world around it.
Architecture. Landscape. History. Technology. Culture. Politics. Humor. People who did not necessarily arrive intending to look at art.
Public space changes the relationship between an object and its audience.
That tension — between idea, object, environment and encounter — is increasingly where I want my work to live.