Helix II- 3.6m

David Ball is an architectural and landscape sculptor who works from his industrial workshop in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and onsite throughout Australia.

All David’s projects are one-offs.

David has developed many specialist skills during his lifelong career in design and construction, which he has fed into his sculpture. He has nearly four decades of experience as a sculptor and artisan.

“David’s versatility is overwhelming. He is also superb at listening to his clients and transforming what he hears from them into work that makes them think it is speaking just to them. He is masterful.
– Architect Martin O’Toole”

He remembers building an underground cubby house as soon as he could lift a shovel. The cubby collapsed twice but the window of endless possibility the project opened reinforced his determination to design and create. He took every opportunity when he was a boy to design and construct and to experiment with new materials, and he is still doing this.

David spent more than a decade as a young adult turning a crumbling 1865 building into an authentic operational blacksmith shop, guesthouse and licensed colonial restaurant. Bluey Blundstone’s Blacksmith Shop in Melrose won national heritage and tourism awards and was reinstated to the rightful heart of this South Australian town. David experimented in the smithy during this venture and added these skills, along with heritage building, to his repertoire.

He enjoys the stories of steel, its relationship to humankind and the fact that, like stone, it comes from the earth and will eventually crumble back there.

His quest is to find those universal forms that link our architectural world to our natural world. The space in between which we inhabit.