At first encounter, David Spriggs’s works appear almost impossible. Built from hundreds of transparent layers suspended in space, they seem to hover between drawing, sculpture, and apparition. Yet their real subject is not illusion itself, but the process through which an image becomes real.

This becomes particularly clear in Gold. From one position, the fragmented acrylic sheets gather into the figure of a human body. A few steps later, the image dissolves completely, leaving only a series of floating planes. The body has not disappeared, nor has the work changed. What changes is the relationship between the viewer and the object.

Seeing, in this sense, is never simply an optical event. The image does not wait to be discovered as though it were already complete. It emerges through movement, distance, and orientation. The body does not stand outside the world and observe it from afar; it participates in the very construction of what becomes visible.

This condition runs throughout Spriggs’s practice. In Vision, a dense explosion of colour appears simultaneously to implode and expand depending on the viewer's position. In First Wave, a fleeting movement of water is transformed into a spatial structure that can never be grasped from a single viewpoint. These works resist the certainty of the fixed image, insisting instead that perception is always partial, provisional, and embodied.

A similar concern can be found in Jesús Rafael Soto’s Penetrables, where thousands of suspended strands only become meaningful when the viewer physically enters the work. Space is no longer something observed but something inhabited. Julio Le Parc’s kinetic environments likewise reject the static artwork, using light and movement to make vision unstable. Spriggs extends this lineage in a distinctive direction. Rather than activating space itself, he activates the image, treating visibility as something that must be continuously assembled by the viewer.

A slight shift of position is often enough to undo what seemed certain. Forms that appear fully present dissolve into transparent planes, while fragments suddenly gather into unexpected coherence. No single viewpoint can claim authority over the image, and no two encounters are ever entirely the same. The image never arrives all at once. It gathers slowly, emerging from a field of transparent planes as the viewer moves through space. What initially appears to be a stable object continually dissolves and reforms, making perception less an act of observation than one of participation.

Where, exactly, does a David Spriggs work begin?

Is it contained within the transparent sheets themselves, or does it emerge somewhere between light, space, and the movement of the viewer?

His installations quietly challenge one of the central assumptions of modern thought: that objects exist as complete and autonomous entities waiting to be perceived. Bruno Latour famously argued that "we have never been modern," suggesting that the distinctions between subject and object, nature and culture, have always been far more contingent than they appear. Spriggs gives this proposition a material form.

In Spriggs's practice, relations do not simply connect things that already exist; they are the conditions through which things become perceptible in the first place. The image never fully belongs to any single material layer. Suspended across transparent surfaces, it emerges only through the shifting interplay of light, space, matter, and the moving body. What appears stable reveals itself instead as an event of assembly, quietly suggesting that the world we recognise may itself depend upon such fragile constellations of relation.

In this sense, Spriggs does not simply construct images; he constructs the conditions through which images come into being. Reality appears not as something fixed and self-contained, but as something continually assembled through encounters and relations. His work suggests that seeing is never passive - it is one of the ways the world itself is made.

But if the image only emerges through movement, distance, and encounter, can it ever be said to fully exist as an object at all?

Rather than presenting a fixed form, Spriggs constructs a set of conditions through which an image gradually comes into being. Transparent surfaces, surrounding space, shifting light, and the movement of the body do not simply frame the work - they constitute it. What appears before us is less a stable object than a temporary alignment of relations, held together only for the duration of perception.

This perhaps explains why Spriggs repeatedly returns to forms drawn from nature and the body. Waves, clouds, cellular structures, organic growth, and human figures are never presented as isolated entities, but as systems held together by countless invisible relations. In works such as Origins, what appears at first to be a biological form gradually unfolds into a network of interconnected fragments, echoing the way perception itself assembles coherence from multiplicity.

But what do these images ultimately mean? Spriggs suggests that the image itself is never fixed or self-contained, but continually produced through relationships between form, light, space, and the viewer. His installations transform these invisible relations into a visual experience, where meaning emerges not from isolated objects, but from the shifting conditions of perception.

His installations give temporary form to these otherwise invisible relations, making perception itself an act of organisation. Perhaps the question Spriggs ultimately poses is not simply how an image comes into being, but whether the world we recognise exists independently of these relations at all. If reality can only be assembled through the shifting interplay of body, space, light, and matter, then seeing may not merely reveal the world—it may be one of the ways the world continually comes into being.