Dan petley

Dan Petley’s work engages with vernacular culture, participation, and self-organisation. It explores how artworks can acquire new value without losing the qualities that made them meaningful, through a synthesis of the collector’s impulse for improvisation and immediacy with themes of continuity and authorship.

He creates artworks and exhibitions that merge distillations of pre-modern iconography and emblematic traditions, with lost and discarded items, to explore subjectivity.

By bringing mythological narratives into dialogue with the quietly resilient spirit of everyday humanity, discarded objects and forgotten places are transformed into contemporary sites of shared authorship.

This has evolved into a multidisciplinary reciprocal process that explores hierarchy and cohesion in the creation of communal public work.