The Willoughby Gallery show, 2024

The Art of Things: an exhibition of sculpted works
"There is no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects" Clarissa Dalloway in Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours'~
Introductory essay below images

                 Passers-by at my workshop in Rutland will stop at times to find out what I do, to admire some pieces or ask about the craft of carving. At times I w ill get questions like "What kind of bird is that?" – a question I usually cannot answer, or admiration for a dove sculpture that was never intended as a dove. I wish to say, at times, that my sculptures set out to transcend the specific, the individuality of things in the actual world. But I'm loathe to claim too much for what I perhaps simply prefer. I also recall a lad who, with no particular interest in art, or, apparently, in any of these birds, walked up and the only piece he had eyes for was an abstract carving that sat high on a shelf. Here was someone who had been struck by a work without the reinforcement of its relation to the everyday world. His imagination, for a moment, was floating free of what the mind itself demands: the recognition and placing of what is in its field of vision. 'What is it?' is a fundamental question that underpins much of what we acknowledge in our lives, and accounts for much that we reject, or even cannot see. This response seems to have come down to us from our furthest ancestry or even from the first evolution of our minds and senses. It is also perhaps part of the very sensible immediate world of everyday matters and of everyday reality. Managing our daily lives is what we do first and primarily, even exhaustingly. So, when this lad acknowledged the abstraction he had, at least momentarily, quite side-stepped this primal need to place things, to see only what made sense in the sensory and socially constructed understanding that shapes our day-to-day responses, what Richard Jeffreys once called 'the wooden stage of commonplace life.' Here he was, engaging his imaginative response rather than the need to pin things down.
              Working in stone is a challenge that brings together both sides of this issue. It is an early lesson in life to recognise the reality of things, the harsh fact of the ground under our feet, and the dangers of being objects ourselves in a world of material things. 'Things' are part of the reality that we must manage, beyond self and our desires. But it is a reality, ironically, we also use. The stone age testifies to that, in its place in human development and in the initial creation of some of the types of tools I now use. Fast forward to the great ages of stone sculpture in the West, say, 5th century Greece or Renaissance Italy, and we can see the struggle to master marble with the simplest of metal tools that allows us all, even as viewers, to transcend the brute stone, just as the lad in my workshop did by seeing first the transformation. And it is this conflict between the primitive response that our minds trigger automatically, the intransigent nature of the external world, as represented by the stone, and the historically later sophistication of the human mind that inspires me.
             This exhibition demonstrates many aspects of this issue. The three pieces 'Paradise Reclaimed' offer a kind of pure abstraction, by taking the dull grey stone from the quarry and applying the simplest of forms the mind can offer, then drawing out of the stone its astonishing character by refining and polishing. This 'emergent' element to all my work transfixes me. In the sculptures we get to see what the stone can become in the presence of the human imagination and at the same time how the stone itself relates beyond itself. In the display visitors will see a range of highly stylised bird sculptures, contrasted with a series of falling figures. They have no direct relation with each other, other than that they are all falling forms, and they represent a desire in some of my work to pursue an outlook even as my main action as a carver is to press forward the actual shaping process that is in the heart of the sculptor's action, and quite antithetical to the strictures of an idea or to Nature in the raw. As the visitor moves around the exhibition it will perhaps become evident that much of the work is dictated by a pursuit of line and surface. For me, this is the primary action of the sculptor, working on the undifferentiated mass of stone, from which it all begins. The work in the upper gallery ranges from the extremes of geometrical abstraction, as with 'Sailing To St Ives' (originally intended as a homage to Ben Nicholson when I was exhibiting in St Ives), to the cultural context of other arts: the cubist inspired guitars hark back to a love of artists like Jacques Lipchitz and Pablo Picasso, and forward to the electric guitar that has released itself from having to have a defined form at all. Form freed from function.
            There is an unsatisfied hunger in the gaze that falls on the world. It is not the hunger of the mind to simply know its world, to name, to control, to manage. Rather, it comes from the human mind that gazes, that alights upon the world, finding, in a sense, what has no practical value, and also perhaps seeking to annul its otherness. Most of what I do presses towards a lessening of this gap between us and external reality. The philosopher F H Bradley once wrote of how the self refuses to recognise itself as part of the objective world, only recognising objective reality when it is transformed into subjective terms. The sculptor is always involved in this dilemma in consciousness: to transform the external world into self and at the same time seek, in the name of truth, to recognise the external world at the same time.
                The final aspect of my carving life that I would like to refer to perhaps comes, ironically, from my early love of painting. I was no more that 15 years of age when I had already developed a love of Cezanne, and in consequence, the Cubists. The desire of these artists to recognise in their work the object in its full 3-d reality has meant a lot to the developed aesthetic sense I bring to sculpture. Painting had never been so 'thingy', so roughly painted or so fully represented dimensionally, before Cezanne, leading later to the Cubist development of collage and the inclusion of actual things in the art. I felt strangely reassured by this desire to represent the truth of things. Acting directly, as a carver, on the most intransigent of media, I felt that I was recognising the material world and transforming it at the same time. As a driving force, this has been what has mattered.