Ken Smith
Ken Smith is a sculptor of the soul. His highly original work unites a rare sensitivity to the intuitive simplicity of forms with a wonderful depth of feeling. The images created by Ken are at once beautiful, elegant and inspiring. Whether these images sit in the garden or in the living room they bring a sense of meaning and a sense of the sacred in life. May the magic of Ken Smith’s sculptures engage human imagination and the human spirit all over the world.
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Satish Kumar
Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist
Ken Smith 2017 texts by
Philip Vann Dr Tom Flynn Nicholas Usherwood
www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG  Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545
KEN SMITH: EMBRACING THE PRIMORDIAL IN SCULPTURE by Philip Vann
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Assistant Sacristan
polyphant 16 x 14 x 7 cms 61⁄4 x 51⁄2 x 23⁄4 ins
In his taut, often curvilinear, muscular sculptures, Ken Smith sets out to explore how people relate with each other – and so with wider nature – in a spirit of naked and poignant intimacy. These works are invariably grounded in the human form (though he has been known to make the occasional animal or bird figure). They portray the solitary individual deep in ecstatic or desolate self-absorption, in a state of desperate free-fall or soaring, winglike ascension; lovers melding into each other in conditions of sensuous grace; groups of people upholding each other in tender familial embraces or mourning together over the cruel bereavements and ineffable hardships of war and conflict. Above all, his at once rough-hewn yet delicately intricate carvings move us because they evoke how archetypal human qualities of dignity and anguished vulnerability, gentleness and powerful resilience, are inseparably linked. He is a largely self-taught sculptor who, through many remarkable vicissitudes of life, has perennially felt compelled to create, to articulate in stone his subtlest intuitions and perceptions. As he expresses it, ‘this line in my sculpture is really a sentence – a sentence as in words. I’m not writing down how I feel, rather it’s written in stone – by the shapes, forms, twisting, whatever.’ There is a marked intuitive sophistication to his approach as a sculptor, even powerfully evident in the first sculptures he made in his late teens, before he had had the time and opportunity to peruse contemporary art books. His artistic sensibility is naturally drawn to the kind of primordial expressiveness that is evident in the kind of archaic African and Oceanic sculpture that so inspired and influenced leading twentieth century Modernist artists and
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sculptors, such as Picasso, Archipenko, Lipchitz and Epstein – all artists he
Free Fall
admires greatly. However, though he has enjoyed and appreciated looking
hopton wood stone 25 x 10 x 10 cms 95⁄8 x 37⁄8 x 37⁄8 ins
at such magical archaic sculptures (as well as the modern works they have helped inspire) over many years, it seems that he has a rare, simply innate or
I’m a very earthy person. I do like my allotment. I do like growing onions, for example, and looking more closely at things as I get older: nature and the earth and the structure of things.
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inborn predilection to this kind of expression. His voice as such is very much his own. For Ken, the making of each sculpture is an unpredictable journey Ken at the age of 31 in 1975.
into the unknown. It is an improvisatory and intuitive process – sometimes verging even onto the wilder shores of Art Brut – but never haphazard or gauchely unconsidered or lacking a dedicated craftsman-like quality. Quite the opposite. He says this is something he doesn’t worry about anymore – though this spontaneously disciplined approach hugely disconcerted some of his teachers at Bristol School of Art in the early 1970s (with one or two encouraging exceptions), who urged him to be more methodical and premeditative. ‘I think they were trying to deconstruct me’, he says, ‘encouraging me to experiment with welding and other fashionable contemporary practices. I don’t make any preparatory drawings and very rarely do any maquettes. At first, I think and carve and listen to music in the studio; then after a while a memory of something comes up. Then other memories and emotions surge up and that comes into the stone; then I get charged up and start working faster and faster. It’s a gradual process, once the ideas start to come. It’s usually only a matter of two or three weeks till the work is about finished. ‘I do feel very empathetic to things I’m not even in touch with; it’s the visual thing on television or an article in the papers, reading, say, about the suffering of children and women in wars from Bosnia to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. I don’t get overtly upset about it but I do feel highly empathetic to their plight. The resulting sculpture won’t do much for them but it does help me to come to terms with what I read and absorb.
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‘I’m a very earthy person. I do like my allotment. I do like growing onions,
Cowl (large)
for example, and looking more closely at things as I get older: nature and
bronze - an edition of 9 98 x 73 x 73 cms 385⁄8 x 283⁄4 x 283⁄4 ins
the earth and the structure of things. I don’t just knock out a sculpture – they take a long time. While working, there’s this going back as far as I can
With marble you chip back endlessly and bits fall out; it’s difficult to do a line; you can achieve that but it’s much easier with polyphant or limestone; you can carve a flawless line right round a piece.
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into my life: my childhood, relationships, friends at school, holidays, and people of all kinds. I use music a lot in my work – put the classic radio on, and it brings up all sorts of associations in my life, which then inspire and feed the sculpture.’ Most of Ken’s sculptures are made from polyphant, a stone he buys from a quarry on the Devon-Cornwall border in a village called Polyphant. Its lovely blue-grey, iron oxide speckled surfaces are sculpted to become melodiously curvaceous and smooth. He likes the way it can be polished and polished so that it can appear ‘smoother than an egg. The beauty of polyphant is you can start carving at one end and continue carving fluently right round to the other side. With marble you chip back endlessly and bits fall out; it’s difficult to do a line; you can achieve that but it’s much easier with polyphant or limestone; you can carve a flawless line right round a piece. Polyphant’s softer and more malleable and it’s got these beautiful colours in it. A lot of people would say it is a waste of time but I just think the more highly polished it is the more expressive it is for the viewer.’ In time he intends to go back to working in marble, which was the material he used for Unity (2007), a powerful, large-scale version of his sculpture Suppression (no. 4), made when he was working as sculptor-inresidence at Reads Hotel in rural Majorca. For that project, which took him several months, he used diamond-cutting tools (with advice from artisans working at the local marble works where he created the sculpture from one single monumental block). He also likes using brownish Hamstone and Hopton Wood stone – both forms of limestone – which he finds satisfyingly
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Suppression polyphant 45 x 22 x 33 cms 171⁄2 x 85⁄8 x 13 ins
raw in their carved effects. Alabaster he appreciates for its translucency and ability, when carved, to transmit varying degrees of light. He says, ‘I met the owner of the quarry at Polyphant the other day. He told my son Dan that he only goes to the mine once a year for three weeks
The process of stone is very slow, because it takes a long time to carve it. And that gives me time to think.
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on his own and cuts it out by hand. So Dan had a word with him and so next time he goes down he’ll contact Dan with what sizes we want, and he will get us the best stone. I hope to buy a good quantity of polyphant now, to store it in case the mine has to be backed up and shut one day.’ In Ken’s 1983 Hopton Wood stone carving Free Fall (no. 2) – depicting a figure deep in contemplation about life’s disturbing precariousness but ultimately upheld by the trust and nurturing support of friends and family (present and absent) – the form of the figure’s emphatically large fingers (with minutely etched-in fingernails) poised over the top of his head has been sharply chiselled out; the resulting shape uncannily resembles a bird’s plumage. Etching on a sculptural surface is important to Ken. ‘I often do fingernails – on a little or sometimes huge hand. I want to give people who don’t understand modern art a hand in really.’ Often final lightly etched or deeply gouged lines – a few strokes conjuring up the spout of a water pitcher, for example, or delineating a foot in a fan-tail pattern are a form of lyrical relief against the consummate roundedness of many of his sculptures. Long, craftsman-like contemplation distinguishes all Smith’s work. ‘The process of stone is very slow’, he says, ‘because it takes a long time to carve it. And that gives me time to think. I’m usually a very quick thinker but with stone I’m quite meticulous. I like things to be finished very well. I suppose I’m a bit of a craftsman as well as being a creative artist. I like to treat the material as it should be – respecting the honesty of the material. I think sculpture is what I was made for really.’ Smith’s favourite tool is a hacksaw blade, so versatile and
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accommodatingly intricate it can be. Often, after hacksawing in a sculpture’s
Warrior
elementary rounded forms, he enjoys, he says, ‘using a little chisel. I go
polyphant 45 x 26 x 16 cms 173⁄4 x 101⁄4 x 61⁄8 ins
round, break up the area a bit. I start putting more sharp things in, but not losing the roundness.’
These costumes were different to anything I saw when I came back to England. So that has stayed with me and I wanted to express the more artistic, flowery side of Japanese culture, which I appreciate.
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The compulsion to speak in stone, as it were, first came to him in his late teens. It has various, diverse roots. Ken was born in Manchester in 1944. His father, a Sergeant in the British Army and, says Ken, ‘a sensitive, gentle, artistic man who played the clarinet and saxophone in the Army Band, and could draw well’, took the family to live in Japan and Singapore soon after the end of the War; Ken was about one and a half then. Ken recalls his mother in his early childhood as being wonderfully warm and supportive though she suffered from
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Swan alabaster 20 x 25 x 25 cms 75⁄8 x 95⁄8 x 97⁄8 ins
depression later on. Although Ken was brought back to live in England, aged about four (the family returned to live in Folkestone in Kent for a while, and then Colchester in Essex where he went to school), he retains vivid early memories of exotic Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong and Singapore and ‘images of paths and being scared of coming across a snake, gutters after the monsoons, poking holes through rice-paper windows in the bedroom, and lying in bed whilst one of two female guards-cum-nannies would hold a gun near me and my brother to protect us against burglars and marauding bandits’. It is fair to say that his sculptures, made as an adult, contain a myriad of curious unconscious echoes of some of these haunting early childhood impressions. His carvings are full of meandering lines, channels and grooves, unmistakably serpentine forms, and fluid, coiling shapes evoking dynamic outpourings of water. Some of his huddled human groups seem to be intuitively guarding against, yet also self-protectively embracing, unseen terrors and dangers. In his diaphanous alabaster sculpture Japanese Female (2016) (no. 20), Ken conjures up an enigmatic figure, an exquisitely poised body of gently oscillating light – her features barely suggested in one downwards-crescent
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Sister Maria Magdelana
alabaster 33 x 8 x 5 cms 13 x 3 x 2 ins
incision on her otherwise smooth, orbic visage. Hers is the most refined naturalness of both posture and attitude, adorned by the kind of kimono Ken recalls both his mother and their female household servants wearing whilst he was a young child in Tokyo. ‘These costumes were different to
Ken at Pangolin Editions, overseeing the casting of the large Square Head in bronze.
anything I saw when I came back to England. So that has stayed with me and I wanted to express the more artistic, flowery side of Japanese culture, which I appreciate. I love the photographs of cherry blossoms in the snow! In this sculpture I wanted to make something very elegant and translucent that would express an early, innate happiness. It was probably my only sculpture that I have done purely for me, recalling my early childhood; it just emerged.’ This sculpture’s diverse folding, pleated shapes are articulated with a simple wavering intricacy and economy of form which has echoes in both alabaster and ivory carving, and Brancusi’s primordially simple, graceful carvings. The enlarged bronze edition of the original sculpture here has a gorgeous, deep emerald patina redolent of jade carvings. After leaving school, Ken worked for a while as a labourer on a building site and a factory worker. In a sculpture he made later on, called the Big Fight, a dense concatenation of several, variously, angry, grief-stricken and serenely understanding visages representing different personae in life (including a ‘loser’, a ‘striver’, and a female figure generously empathising with the character down-on-his-luck), he explored his despairing feelings at that time that he might have to spend the rest of his life drudging away at dully repetitive, frequently arduous manual jobs. He was seventeen when he started an apprenticeship as a carpenterjoiner, when he learnt what he called ‘respect for tools, respect for materials’. Then a year later, searching for inner meaning and direction in his life, he retreated to live in a Friary for two years. He says he found it ‘terrifying at first; the peace and quiet and tranquillity’, but he learned there how ‘to be
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independent, and it had a great effect on my personality. Some of the Friars
Square Head (large)
were really good people, and some of the older ones spent a lot of time
bronze - an edition of 9 64 x 54 x 59 cms 251⁄4 x 211⁄4 x 231⁄4 ins
talking to me about art and literature. I used to go to the chapel from time to time because I liked the Gregorian chants.’
The Friary did round all the sharp bits off me – and the chips on my shoulder! They had great faith in me.
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Holy Man
polyphant 19 x 18 x 22 cms 71⁄2 x 71⁄8 x 85⁄8 ins
His 2016 polyphant sculpture Brother Jeremy, Franciscan (no. 39) is a reimagining of Ken’s close sustaining friendship with one of the friars. ‘It’s about the person I met when I was twenty who greatly influenced my development as a human being, and awakened my interest in literature and philosophy. He certainly wasn’t assigned to help me; we just found each other. We would go for walks and a chat, and he would say, ‘you seem to have a calling [to the religious order]’. I’d say, ‘I’m not sure.’.’ Before Brother Jeremy became a Friar, he had been an English teacher, and he introduced Ken to many new authors. Ken recalls reading as a result Down and Out in Paris and London and Animal Farm by George Orwell; novels by D. H. Lawrence and J. P. Donleavy; before then moving on to reading English translations of Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina) and Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment) as well as Pushkin’s novels. ‘Brother Jeremy said to me, ‘in case you don’t understand a word, here’s a dictionary’, and the Russian authors did indeed take me a long time to read; every time I didn’t understand a phrase, I looked words up. I read these books in the little cell in which I lived. I would see Brother Jeremy every day or so and would have a discussion about each of the books. So I benefited a lot from knowing him. ‘The Friary did round all the sharp bits off me – and the chips on my shoulder! They had great faith in me. The opportunity was there for me to become a friar but they left me free to go to chapel or not. If I wanted to, I did. But if I wanted instead to go and weed the garden or cut some bushes or go and wash up, I’d do that. It really was a liberating time
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Four Figures
polyphant 41 x 25 x 25 cms 161⁄8 x 97⁄8 x 97⁄8 ins
for me.’ Ken’s sculpture, Brother Jeremy, Franciscan (no. 39) appears to depict a larger figure protectively leaning over and holding a smaller, tenderly vulnerable one. On one side, a huge bulbous, flat-faced abstract form
One night at the Friary I went to get my hot-water bottle filled in a tiny kitchen space, where I used to plug the kettle in, and suddenly there was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, filling up the whole place with his robes on!
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extends forward with tremendous presence. One can only begin to speculate what this latter form may represent: perhaps the threatening outer world of drudgery and cultural ignorance from which the Franciscan liberates and protects the seemingly more youthful figure – or perhaps the over-arching, possibly intimidating apparition of a life of formal, dedicated religious practice to which Ken ultimately did not turn. At the Friary, Ken felt able to reconnect with a happier, more relaxed and humorous side of human nature – and, now and then, intimations of real human goodness in acts of simple kindness as well as more substantial intellectual guidance and succour – after an adolescence which had been marked by the repercussions of the increasingly incapacitating depression his mother had been suffering from. ‘One night at the Friary I went to get
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Fleur marble 18 x 15 x 15 cms 71⁄8 x 57⁄8 x 57⁄8 ins
my hot-water bottle filled in a tiny kitchen space, where I used to plug the kettle in, and suddenly there was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, filling up the whole place with his robes on! He said, ‘Sorry! OK, just pouring the water for my hot water bottle – like you. You have my water.’ So he poured the water out for me. He was a lovely, unpretentious man. I only met him for about three or four minutes but I felt there was something special about him.’ In 1975 Ken made his sculpture The Cowl (no. 38), whose quite aeronautical sense of rhythmic dynamism and equilibrium has an echo of the sculptures of Naum Gabo in its quite abstract perception of space and movement – transcending the tangible into some flight into the metaphysical unknown. The slender oval gap at the heart of the sculpture is reminiscent of resonant gaps in Barbara Hepworth’s carvings too (and it is to be noted that
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as an émigré who took refuge in wartime St Ives, Gabo knew, and worked
Twin Form
nearby to, Hepworth). However, Ken has certainly not consciously based his
bronze - an edition of 12 16 x 16 x 14 cms 61⁄4 x 61⁄4 x 51⁄2 ins
highly original work on either of these artists; the influences which may be there are at once both intensely subtle, inchoate even.
[The Cowl] captures the daily rhythm of the friars’ lives. It was immensely satisfying making this lovely wing shape, which might be part of an aeroplane or a propeller.
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Ken says, ‘The Cowl was inspired from my time living at the Friary, and it depicts a monk’s cowl. I used to sit and watch the Friars go around the
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Esperanza alabaster 13 x 6 x 9 cms 5 x 21⁄2 x 31⁄2 ins
cloisters in the shadows and note shadows falling from the cowls themselves, which hid their faces and features. Eleven years after I left I wanted to express how I felt about my time there, and the first thing I thought about was the cowl, with its evocative feelings of hidden enigma. The sculpture captures the daily rhythm of the friars’ lives. It was immensely satisfying making this lovely wing shape, which might be part of an aeroplane or a propeller. It’s a totally abstract work – with just the singular line of the cowl itself circulating around the entire sculpture. There is a balancing out throughout of the convex and the concave. Without the gap at the heart of it, it would be too solid, too earthbound.’ His 2007 polyphant sculpture Motorcyclist (no. 33) was inspired by a memory of ‘taking Brother Jeremy in his habit on the back of my motorcycle, a hundred miles an hour with no helmet in a lightning storm in Dorset!’ We see the large, broad, fiercely focused face of the motorcyclist at the front – ‘the man and the machine meld together’, says Ken. ‘That’s the passenger on the back. He’s looking round as they’re swerving round the bend. I used to enjoy the dangerous thrill of leaning almost right at that moment.’ The human beings and their vehicle have became inextricable, as elements of speed and flesh and machine unite, in intuitively Vorticist fashion, tautly suspended in an instant of concentrated stillness or visceral equilibrium in the midst of an exhilarating, potentially perilous, vortex of speed. A sculpture whose resonance has stayed strongly in Ken’s mind for many years – though he has not revisited the original image since he first saw it
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in an art book about thirty-five years ago – is the Italian Futurist Umberto
Travellers
Boccioni’s 1913 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, portraying an armless,
marble 28 x 24 x 13 cms 11 x 91⁄2 x 51⁄8 ins
aerodynamic human-like figure, in lithe accelerated flow. Boccioni wrote that his was an ‘intuitive search for the unique form which gives continuity in
My tutor never taught me anything because she thought it best that I teach myself. She knew from the first one I had something – so she never interfered.
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space’, which seems to describe also the kinetic aim and intention underlying Ken’s Motorcyclist.
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Abstract Head
polyphant 21 x 14 x 17 cms 81⁄4 x 51⁄2 x 6 3⁄4 ins
While at the Friary, Ken studied part-time from 1962-64 at nearby Yeovil College, where he learned to carve. 'Fortunately for me, Shirley Cousins, the Sculpture Tutor, after a very short time, was happy to leave me to my own devices.' This proved a fresh, liberating experience, especially since, as he now believes, at the time ‘I had no influences whatsoever’. He says he had then heard of Michelangelo and Henry Moore but had no idea or preconception what their works were like. It was only when he went on to attend a one-year Foundation Course at Walthamstow College of Art in London in his early twenties in 1967-68 that he became aware of other people’s art. He had access now to art books (he remembers looking at pictures of sculptures by the Ukrainian-born, American Modernist artist Alexander Archipenko – which he admired greatly) but he made a conscious decision not to be too absorbed in other people’s art. ‘I didn’t want to become too influenced. I wanted to try out things for myself.’ His first sculptures – three of which with a daring innocence, he entered for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1968 (for which they were accepted, and where they sold) – ‘turned out’, he says, ‘very different to what anybody had seen before – they were quite a fresh sort of art in stone because I was expressing my life up to date.’ The second sculpture he ever made was Square Head (1964) (no. 28), made when he was living at the Friary and studying sculpture part-time at a nearby college. This was an amazingly assured and precocious sculpture for any young artist, just twenty-one years old, to make. ‘My tutor never taught
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Soldier and Partner
marble 23 x 16 x 8 cms 8 7⁄8 x 61⁄8 x 31⁄8 ins
me anything because she thought it best that I teach myself. She knew from the first one I had something – so she never interfered. She encouraged me to make a second carving out of ‘a nice big chunk of stone’.’ The underlying concept behind this dystopian work was to examine how humankind had
The Warrior’s diverse forms and angst-ridden discombulated features, cohere into making this a balanced, if incredibly tense and expressive work of art. (no. 5) 17.
Empathy polyphant 22 x 26 x 24 cms 8 5⁄8 x 101⁄4 x 91⁄2 ins
moved on from its wild, primitive and organic origins – represented on one side by a smooth, dense cavity contoured by fluid, sweeping lines – to a contemporary mechanical-figurative state in which human features are seen to meld with bizarre seamlessness with the robotic cogs and Brutalist building blocks of modern technology. Though at the time Ken was unaware of Jacob Epstein’s 1913 sculpture The Rock Drill – in which a mechanised, abstracted human figure with armoured body and visage (whether aggressor or victim is uncertain) stands above a real miner’s rock drill – he now sees affinities between that Modernist masterpiece and what he was striving to express in Square Head. Between 2006 and 2009, Ken made one of his most ambitious and audacious sculptures to date, The Warrior (no. 5). In this work, figurative abstraction of the most surreal kind has come dynamically into play. The work’s abundance of jutting, jarring, sparring, indented, striated and geometricised forms – along with the warrior’s angst-ridden, discombobulated features – cohere into making this a balanced, if incredibly tense and expressive work of art. Ken explains the origins of The Warrior: ‘I worked in the Fleet Air Arm in 1968 for just over a year at Yeovilton Air Base (near Yeovil in Somerset). My job was as Air Maintenance Control Officer overseeing the service of six Sea Vixens fighter jets. So this complex and intricate carving, which works as a total form, has elements in it of aeroplane engine parts, the pilots in their uniforms and goggles as well as the tools and radar and electronic plane components that I had to continually inspect and ensure were serviced in the
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Victims of Conflict
polyphant 31 x 23 x 20 cms 121⁄4 x 9 x 75⁄8 ins
right flying hours. I was subsequently given an even more demanding job – to make sure that all the plane electrics, ejector seats, engine parts, wings etc. were all changed after a fixed period. I didn’t realise how dangerous and risky this job was until I left.’
A flavour of the spirit of Ken’s life as a young aspirant sculptor is given by this recollection: ‘ I did O and A Levels at Yeovil Technical College. I was living in the Priory. They supported me and I got a £100 a year from Essex County Council. And I was a very good weight: I was nine stone, four! I had to walk three or four miles down the main road every day to get to college,
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Japanese Female
alabaster 20 x 8 x 8 cms 7 7⁄8 x 31⁄8 x 31⁄8 ins
sometimes carrying a monumental sculpture like The Square Head all that way on my back!’ Around 1968, Ken and his wife Ros, whom he had met the previous year, went to live on a farm in Dorset, and she encouraged him to continue making sculptures. ‘I recall then picking up a copy of Arts Review and looking up galleries and seeing the Bruton Gallery in Somerset. I went along to see them and they liked my work and agreed to show two of my sculptures, the second and third ones I had ever made, and they sold (which included Square Head).’ The theme of Square Head (no. 28) is revisited in his 2003 polyphant sculpture, Mechanic (no. 32), in which, he says, ‘as in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, our personalities and ways of walking and lifting and moving all become inseparable from our technology. As a result, we become automata in the way we move around.’ From one aspect, the Mechanic figure retains a graceful humane dignity in its rather pinched, credible features and polished swathes of curvilinear costuming. From another aspect, its body comprises a massive, single vertebral-like column and the back of its head (which may also represent the human face itself in an eerie hallucinatory vision) resembles human features that have been surreally disfigured by some ghastly detonation or extreme medical experiment. Such works possess, as well as an extraordinary diversity of expressive forms, an undoubted prophetic
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Reclining Nude
alabaster 15 x 32 x 15 cms 57⁄8 x 125⁄8 x 57⁄8 ins
or visionary quality and perhaps a subtle warning about the ‘progress’ and precarious fate of humankind. In a 2016 polyphant sculpture, Abstract Head (no. 15), Ken also reexplores the theme of Square Head. The rigid block-like quality of that
Henry Moore's letter to Ken.
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Eyre alabaster 38 x 18 x 23 cms 15 x 7 x 9 ins
early sculpture (though with its smooth rounded passages) has given way to a more circumambient smoothness here (though with some hard-edged geometric passages). However, Abstract Head does not soothe or reassure the viewer in any way at all; it has its own daunting and disconcerting quality in that the human head seems to have metamorphosed into a kind of sentient (but actually bluntly unfeeling in a moral empathetic sense) form of a military helmet, both protective and minatory in quality.
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In April 1971, Ken Smith sent a number of photographs of his first
Kiss
sculptures to Henry Moore. He received an encouraging personal reply
alabaster 22 x 9 x 8 cms 85⁄8 x 31⁄2 x 31⁄8 ins
(signed in the sculptor’s absence and dated 6th July 1971), in which Moore said, ‘I have looked at the photographs [of your work] and find them
One thing Henry Moore did say to me, he wrote and said I was true to my materials. He said I was using stone but I wasn’t trying to make the stone appear like sheets, loaves of bread or locks of hair.
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promising and interesting. I would like to arrange a time when you could come and see me, but I leave for Italy in ten days’ time, where I go every year for two or three months’ to carve, so it won’t be until October that I am here again. Perhaps you would like to write to me again in early October to suggest a date when you could come and see me.’ There was a further exchange of letters over the next year with Moore’s secretary – but each time a date for a meeting was suggested and agreed, it had to be cancelled, as ‘Mr Moore has had to go abroad’. It was agreed that Ken would visit Moore in Carrara in Italy, and he found a place to stay about ten miles away but then received another letter saying that, owing to unforeseen circumstances, Moore had had to return to England for personal reasons. Ken still went to stay near Carrara for a holiday. Moore then wrote and suggested that Smith approach the Slade School of Art, which he did – presenting examples of his work, accompanied by a sealed letter from Moore to the then Professor of Sculpture, Reg Butler. ‘I went to see Reg Butler, and he was very kind, gave me a mug of tea, showed me around all the studios, and said, ‘well, if Henry Moore says he thinks you’re OK, then I think you’d better pop along and study here’.’ But Ken decided he would not take up this offer – ‘as not having then undertaken a Foundation year, never mind a three-year degree course, I didn’t feel I was good enough to go there then. And realising how high up the Slade was in the hierarchy of education, I just didn’t have the confidence.’ Ken says that his prime motivation for making sculptures is ‘the physicality of it; it’s holding the chisel and going into the stone and finding
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how it’s going to work for you, where the grain is; and then working with
Journey Man
the stone. One thing Henry Moore did say to me, he wrote and said I was
polyphant 36 x 21 x 16 cms 141⁄8 x 81⁄4 x 61⁄4 ins
true to my materials. He said I was using stone but I wasn’t trying to make the stone appear like sheets, loaves of bread or locks of hair. Rather I was
making it look like organic forms from the earth itself. So I was true to the way I worked with my materials, he said.’ In the mid-1980s Ken and his wife Ros were invited round for tea to a house in Dorset where Mary Moore, Henry Moore’s daughter, and her husband, the American art dealer Ray Danowski, were living. Mary Moore told him, ‘My dad liked your sculptures and I do too.’ Ray Danowski proceeded to give Ken a thorough criticism of his work, saying, ‘continue as you’re going. Keep working in stone, that’s your medium, and don’t be diverted by advice from others to go off on a tangent or deviate into other materials.’ From 1972-75, when Ken studied art at Bristol School of Art, ‘at last’, he says, ‘I was able to see a good many more art books – in the library there. I mostly spent my days there studying etching and lithography, and only started sculpting in the evenings in the studio when the teachers were
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Soldier from Azigmur
bronze - edition of 12 20 x 17 x 13 cms 75⁄8 x 61⁄2 x 51⁄8 ins
no longer present. I do recall one day that the eminent sculptor Willi Soukop came down from London to the Bristol College and said to me, ‘you’re accepted to go the Royal Academy Schools to study sculpture, if you like, but you’d be wasting your time and mine too’. I had found my handwriting as a sculptor by then, and Soukop recommended that I should become a postman, get up early and work on my sculpture in the afternoon. He felt I didn’t need anybody to teach me now. He was right.’ Empathy is a key term in appreciating and understanding Ken’s sculptures. Empathy (no. 17) is indeed the title of a recent polyphant sculpture, in which a crouching, featureless human figure wraps a vast protective serpentine arm around another slighter figure, almost, it seems,
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squeezing the life out of this creature in its grippingly empathetic embrace.
Suppression (large)
An earlier polyphant carving, Strength in Unity – where a similar theme was
bronze - an edition of 9 89 x 44 x 66 cms 35 x 173⁄8 x 26 ins
at play – has three rounded heads, seemingly representing father, mother and child. From one side the father’s vast, bulky, extended arm is seen to
The predicament of silenced, censored human beings, and their suppressed art and culture, has long preoccupied Ken.
encircle and protect the other two figures – but it is also noticeable that the
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somewhat floating, yet weighty figure of the paterfamilias is itself supported
Talisman
by and totally dependent on the other two characters, who are firmly rooted
to the ground.
bronze - an edition of 9 20 x 14 x 17 cms 75⁄8 x 51⁄2 x 61⁄2 ins
The sculpture Victims of Conflict (c.1994) (no. 18) also shows a close family unit but in this case the embrace is of the most traumatic kind. This work was made in response to the Bosnian War, the armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, and whose harrowing images were widely disseminated on television news and in the newspapers at the time. Ken says, ‘here two parents hold a dead child in an encircling embrace. The mother’s got her head close to the child. The father’s mouth is open, and I imagine if you have a tremendous shock like when you go to scream, you’re so shocked you can’t get a sound out, rather like the silent scream in Munch’s famous painting.’ This sculpture has abundant serpentine curves and harmonious orbic shapes characteristic of Ken’s portrayals of a loving, embracing family group. However, the tragedy of the situation is revealed here by the wretched expression on one parent’s face and by the gaping fissure of the other’s open mouth (rather resembling that of a grieving Eve in Masaccio’s 1425 masterpiece, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden) – truly an appalling abyss in all senses of the latter word. When Smith started his polyphant sculpture The Water Carrier (no. 45), it depicted a mother holding a child tightly in her arms in a characteristically serpentine embrace. The finished sculpture actually depicts the adult figure embracing a water bottle. A moving symbolic equivalence is made here
27.
Woman with No Voice
polyphant 36 x 14 x 25 cms 141⁄8 x 51⁄2 x 97⁄8 ins
between child and water: both are the wellspring of life. Ken says, ‘There’s a lot of love in my work. But love and grief are joined, aren’t they? I don’t look into it very deeply but I do have these emotional feelings and I do read about what’s happening in the world and look at the
There’s a lot of love in my work. But love and grief are joined, aren’t they? I don’t look into it very deeply but I do have these emotional feelings and I do read about what’s happening in the world and look at the news.
“
”
news. The way I keep myself together is by expressing such things in my work, and other people can get to understand through the titles and a bit of information what these sculptures mean. They’ll get some understanding it’s not just lumps of stone with square bits and holes but it’s also a journey to find out more about oneself and other people. ‘It’s not my mission as a sculptor to always portray violence; it does raise its ugly head from time to time. It affects me some times more than others and that’s when I go and express my great empathy and dissatisfaction with what’s going on; it gets out in the work.’ Ken is right to call The Woman with No Voice (polyphant; 2016) (no. 27) ‘a very important and interesting sculpture’. He says he is ‘aware that the cultures of countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Iran are different in so
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Square Head
polyphant 32 x 27 x 30 cms 12 5⁄8 x 10 5⁄8 x 115⁄8 ins
many ways to ours in the more liberal west but I am not so blinkered as not to know that you have to understand something about the background of social and government power structures in these countries to understand people’s lives and predicaments there’. The subject of this sculpture ‘is a fine, strong-looking woman – but no mouth with which to speak and express herself. Within she has a soft, caring mind and it can’t come out. The work’s angular passages and the holes at the bottom are a way, I think, of interpreting or evoking her struggle to get the love out; but she can’t do it; she’s cut up, in a prison or cage. But then you look at the pure form of the head and see, along with all the pain she’s living with, her beauty and tranquillity of spirit.’ This consummate sculpture is a tour de force in its assured admixture of all kinds of expressive forms, ranging from the scrumbled swathe of
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her headscarf to the poignantly immaculate detail of four tiny, attenuated
Dream
fingers and thumb – at the end of a spindly forearm – touching the earth.
alabaster 21 x 34 x 22 cms 81⁄4 x 13 3⁄8 x 8 5⁄8 ins
The dignity and imprisoned suffering spirit of this woman are presented without an iota of sentimentality.
This is humanity seen reduced to its naked essentials as ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ (Suppression no. 4)
The predicament of silenced, censored human beings, and their suppressed art and culture, has long preoccupied Ken. The version of his robust and brilliantly compacted sculpture Suppression (no. 4) in this exhibition was made in 2013. He says, ‘All versions I have made of this sculpture are based on the original which I sold at the Royal Academy in 1974. The idea behind it came around 1967, when I started reading contemporary Russian writers like the poet Yevtushenko and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the 1962 novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, telling the story of daily life (under the most gruelling conditions) of an ordinary innocent prisoner in a Soviet forced labour camp in the 1950s. I had a friend at Walthamstow Art School who loved these writers and introduced me to them. I found myself contemplating the image of the Soviet flag, the Hammer and Sickle, in itself a startling image. So in Suppression, you can see the form of the sickle, and then the hammer’s down the side. ‘The sculpture evokes the sadness of a cowed single figure. Low down you can see the buttocks and two thighs; above is the head utterly beleaguered. The figure’s been hammered, beaten down into the earth, told by the System, ‘you cannot be creative; you must do as you’re told; you will write what I say.’ This is humanity seen reduced to its naked essentials as
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‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ (in Shakespeare’s phrase); however, there is
Female Figure
a potential redemptive note here evident in the way this crushed, rounded
bronze - an edition of 9 31 x 16 x 10 cms 121⁄4 x 61⁄4 x 37⁄8 ins
figure appears, in his or her huddled state, to be embracing him or herself – or rather embracing the survival instinct and essence of love and hope at the core of his or her being.
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We are as One
polyphant 18 x 23 x 13 cms 67⁄8 x 9 x 51⁄8 ins
Other human figures by Ken are intimately portrayed in a state of innocent sensuous felicity – as bodies of light and delight. His alabaster Reclining Nude (no. 20) succinctly and sparingly depicts a naked female body in a state of voluptuous ease and abandon, in which breasts,
buttocks, abdomen, thighs and even the head and hair are composed of intersecting, abstracted curvesome forms, and rather like the so-called Venus figurines – or prehistoric statuettes of ample-bodied women made during the Paleolithic era, mostly found in Europe – devoid of personalising detail and without hands or feet. His alabaster sculpture Dream (no. 29) also appears to describe sensuous orbic human shapes and forms but here arrayed in almost delirious profusion. The title Dream is very telling: it would appear that no individual human presences are identified at all, nor are any singular human attributes. This work is overall a delicately disorientating visionary inscape of abstracted, naked human bodily presence; the surreal nature of its dreamlike beauty may be hauntingly disquieting but it is, surprisingly, not at all sinister. There are intuitive affinities here with biomorphic sculptures by Jean Arp – a sculptor working in the 1920s and ‘30s – whose shapes were themselves influenced by natural forms such as buds and worn pebbles. It is worth noticing here too that what Smith greatly admires in early Renaissance Italian painting – along with its mythological and symbolic content – is the quite sculptural portrayal of ‘the flesh and fabrics of the nymphs, and the arms and legs in general, in Bronzino and the sinuous lacy
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Mechanic slate 20 x 6 x 5 cms 75⁄8 x 23⁄8 x 2 ins
details in Botticelli’. Ken says, ‘My priority in life has always been my family’ – his wife Ros, his two sons Simon and Dan and now five grandchildren. After studying art at Bristol, he went on to train in social work, and spent twenty-four years as a social worker at Chippenham near Bath. In many ways, he says, ‘this was very difficult work. I am pleased that I was able to help a
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good number of children whilst in the job. I worked hard at sculpture in
Motorcyclist
the evenings and at weekends when I was a social worker – because time
polyphant 23 x 27 x 20 cms 9 x 10 5⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins
was so precious. It was so therapeutic. For me, sculpture and childcare go hand in hand. As a social worker, I met so many different types of
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Madame P
bronze - an edition of 9 20 x 6 x 5 cms 75⁄8 x 23⁄8 x 2 ins
Ken with his sculpture The Final Curtain which he presented to Leeds Playhouse in 1999
people – from the most high-up in society to the most vulnerable – it has all fed into my work.’ He feels he has been fortunate always whilst sculpting to have had a number of appreciative patrons over the years. ‘My first patron, Ian Philips, a businessman, architect and philanthropist, had a mill and two swans in the lake – he would ring a bell and the swans would come for breakfast! The abstracted shapes of my alabaster sculpture of a Swan (about 1982) (no. 6) come from that time. Both Ian and his son Colin were always very supportive, and built a studio for me in my garden in Bath.’ Bernard Sandler, a businessman and theatre producer – and Founding Chairman of Leeds Playhouse – bought Suppression, one of two sculptures
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Ken exhibited at the RA in 1973; the other work sold too. ‘Bernard always
Warrior
supported me in various emotional and practical ways and helped me with
my confidence as a sculptor. In his wife Taube, who had trained in her native
bronze - an edition of 12 45 x 26 x 16 cms 173⁄4 x 101⁄4 x 61⁄8 ins
New York as a painter, I found great comfort at social gatherings – and they
Ken Smith is a sculptor of the soul. His highly original work unites a rare sensitivity to the intuitive simplicity of forms with a wonderful depth of feeling.
“
”
Satish Kumar
put on a show of my work in their West End flat in 1974 – when she would always gently stroke my hand to reassure me. After Taube died, I spent three years carving the sculpture Madam P. (no. 34) (the title is taken from that of a Brancusi sculpture) to try and convey my feelings of how gentle and kind and empathetic she was as a person. I think the work expresses her aura of tranquillity well. ‘When Bernard died, I spoke at his Memorial Service at the Tricycle
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Theatre in Kilburn, where he had been Chairman. I was delighted
Empathy
to donate a sculpture, The Final Curtain, to Leeds Playhouse in his
memory.’
bronze - an edition of 12 22 x 26 x 24 cms 85⁄8 x 101⁄4 x 91⁄2 ins
I myself have known Ken and his sculptures since 1974, when I was sixteen, when I attended the show of his work in London. Over time the original vision and quality of his art have become increasingly clear to me. I would like to end this essay with this recent quote from Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus, Resurgence & Ecologist: ‘Ken Smith is a sculptor of the soul. His highly original work unites a rare sensitivity to the intuitive simplicity of forms with a wonderful depth of feeling. The images created by Ken are at once beautiful, elegant and inspiring. Whether these images sit in the garden or in the living room they bring a sense of meaning and a sense of the sacred in life. May the magic of Ken Smith’s sculptures engage human imagination and the human spirit all over the world.’ Philip Vann, June 2017
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Family Group
polyphant 27 x 24 x 19 cms 10 5⁄8 x 91⁄2 x 71⁄2 ins
Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts. His critically acclaimed book, Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century was published in 2004. He has written books on a number of twentieth century and contemporary British and Irish artists, including Cyril Power, William Crozier, Greg Tricker, Dora Holzhandler, Joash Woodrow, Tessa Newcomb and Keith Vaughan. He lives in Cambridge.
Ken Smith by Dr Tom Flynn
An early photograph of Cowl
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Cowl
a unique piece due to be cast in bronze an edition of 9 49 x 37 x 37 cms 191⁄4 x 145⁄8 x 145⁄8 ins
I was first alerted to Ken Smith’s work several years ago, and quite out of the blue. I was immediately struck by the robust honesty of his technique and by the fact that much of his work was made in West Country stone, particularly that lovely, dark, mottled material called polyphant. But it was the self-taught aspect of his practice that was most striking. Here was a guy who simply had to carve, who was driven by some inner engine to make things. Sculpture was his language and he’d been doing it for decades, indeed ever since receiving encouragement from Henry Moore, who also clearly recognised his innate ability to speak through the stone. Ken Smith’s sculptural voice is not a learnt voice, it is an authentic expression of his instinct for three-dimensional form. There is little doubt that this is a product of his earlier work as a carpenter and joiner. Like many artists who came of age in the post-war period, Smith was driven by a deep inner need to make things, to hunker down in the material world and for there to be some material outcome from that process. This is the true sculptor’s instinct, pure and simple. It’s instructive that in his late twenties Smith was offered a place at the Slade School of Art (on a recommendation from Henry Moore, who recognised his nascent talent). In the event he chose not to take up the offer, sensing that having already missed out on the often obligatory foundation course would place him at a disadvantage from his fellow students. That may have been the best decision he ever made. As a result, his work emerges into the world unmediated and unencumbered, untouched by formal pedagogical guidance. That is not to say that he has not been touched by external influences. Surveying his sculpture
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Brother Jeremy, Franciscan
polyphant 31 x 32 x 32 cms 121⁄4 x 125⁄8 x 125⁄8 ins
one sees evidence of a mind and eye alert to the broader historical development of sculpture. He is clearly a product of his era and yet his work is highly individual and idiosyncratic, the robust forms entirely in tune with the materials in which they’ve been worked.
Smith is an adept at carving. From the local Devon stone known as polyphant he has created a number of works that have a strangely magical, haptic quality, their crisply carved convex ridges and creases folding seamlessly into softly contoured concavities.These are objects that beg to be touched and stroked. He often polishes the work to coax out the stone’s naturally mottled colour and visual warmth. Some of the finer examples in this material, such as the Soldier of Mercy and The Square Head, have an internal energy that recalls the work of the Russian modernist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and of the great
40.
Japanese Female
bronze - an edition of 12 20 x 8 x 8 cms 77⁄8 x 31⁄8 x 31⁄8 ins
Jacob Epstein. Above all, these works suggest Smith’s susceptibility to the power of the primitive, a leaning that connects him to an earlier generation of European artists including, of course, Epstein, and indeed Moore. His feeling for the primitive is nowhere more apparent than in the totemic work in slate entitled The Mechanic. Viewed in silhouette it is vaguely suggestive of a cloaked human form, a watchful, minatory presence. However, viewing it from another angle reveals a contrastingly complex arrangement of chunky, interlocking elements, softly serrated edges and deep indentations. Epstein is also distantly echoed in the monumental carved marble work called Unity, located in the grounds of a hotel in Majorca. It has the bulky dynamism of Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel (Tate Britain), the formal components of which have been rephrased into an elegant abstraction. This confirms, as well as any of his works, how Smith understands the difference between size and scale and how capable he is at responding
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sensitively and creatively to specific environments. The piece took him
Reclining Nude
several months to carve, testament to his capacity to meet the stone
bronze - an edition of 12 15 x 32 x 15 cms 57⁄8 x 125⁄8 x 57⁄8 ins
on equal terms, tenaciously coaxing from an obdurate mass of marble a touching symbol of human connectedness.
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Head
bronze - an edition of 9 34 x 36 x 24 cms 131⁄4 x 141⁄8 x 91⁄2 ins
The monumental carved marble work called Unity, located in the grounds of a hotel in Majorca.
It’s rare indeed to come across an almost entirely self-taught artist whose sculpture ranks alongside some of the finest works by more celebrated practitioners. It is his integrity, that truth to his own nature, that enables him to continue adding to a body of work of very significant range and quality. Dr Tom Flynn
Tom Flynn is an art historian, journalist and critic. A former Henry Moore Foundation PostDoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, he is the author of The Body in Sculpture (Routledge 1997) and monographs on a number of contemporary sculptors, including Sean Henry, Charlotte Mayer and Terence Coventry.
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Soldier and Partner
bronze - an edition of 12 23 x 16 x 8 cms 87⁄8 x 61⁄8 x 31⁄8 ins
Ken Smith by Nicholas Usherwood
At the heart of Ken Smith’s powerful sculpture lies a highly significant dynamic, one in which the old Renaissance ideals of the Active and Contemplative life are given a contemporary expression in an art that reflects, on the one hand, Ken’s lifelong search for inner spiritual resolution in his personal life and, on the other, an outward temperament that has always had to be actively involved in making and doing. It is all there in the biography in truth; leaving school at fifteen he worked at a variety of manual jobs before apprenticing, two years later, as a carpenter and joiner. Then, at the age of twenty, as he puts it “searching for some inner a meaning and direction”, he joined a Franciscan friary where, during the course of the two years he spent there, he was sent to Yeovil College and, among other things, studied A-level art. Although other, brief, periods of art-school training followed, it was these early experiences that set him firmly on his highly independent and intensely determined way, all the sculpture in this first London gallery solo show the outcome of a completely personal journey, one in which he is “driven in the search to fulfil my spirituality...a life written in stone.” Nicholas Usherwood, June 2017. Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor of Galleries magazine, has curated many exhibitions and has written a variety of publications on 20th century British artists.
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Figures in a Landscape at Eggardon Hill
bronze - an edition of 9 26 x 12 x 11 cms 101⁄4 x 41⁄2 x 43⁄8 ins
45.
The Water Carrier
polyphant 20 x 24 x 14 cms 77⁄8 x 91⁄2 x 51⁄2 ins
'Ken Smith very kindly gave me his beautifully humane sculpture, The Water Carrier, as a gift about two years ago. I had first met Ken at his central London exhibition in 1974, when I was sixteen, but started to get to know him, and look more closely and then write about his work, in the early 2000s. A highlight for me was visiting (in 2007) his justcompleted, at once monumental and intimate marble sculpture Unity in the grounds of a rural Majorcan hotel, where he was then Artist-in-Residence.' Philip Vann
Ken Smith (Kenneth Stanley Smith)
Born 29 February 1944, Manchester Smith spent his early childhood in Japan and Singapore, where his father was stationed in the army. His family returned to England when he was five, and settled in Colchester. He left school at the age of fifteen and did various manual jobs including: upholsterer, bricklayer, factory worker, lorry driver, coal man, fireman, farm worker, even a spell working with an Irish road gang digging trenches at Essex University. Very soon, however, he focused his considerable physical energy on an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner, and began to develop a firm appreciation and respect for using tools and natural materials. Nevertheless, feeling uncertain and in need of inner direction, at the age of twenty, he entered a Franciscan friary in Dorset, where he stayed for two years, living not as a lay brother, but amongst the brothers helping them in their daily routine and learning from their ideals and experiences. The Brothers supported his enrolment at Yeovil Technical College, where he studied for ‘0’ and ‘A’ levels, one of which was in art, where his experience as a carpenter and joiner continued to fuel his early goals as a sculptor. At more or less the same time he worked at Yeovilton Air Base servicing fighter jets. He soon combined all of this into his formal study at Walthamstow College of Art. While studying for a year’s foundation course, he submitted his work for Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The RA judges accepted two of his sculptures and both sold on the opening day. Ken and his new wife Ros then moved to a farm in Dorset, where he split long work days with evenings, and indeed, every spare hour, sculpting. In 1971, he wrote to Henry Moore, sending photographs of his work and Moore’s warm, if indirect encouragement bolstered Smith to keep pursuing sculpture, despite his increasingly demanding daily life. It was Moore who gave him a letter of introduction to Reg Butler, and both men encouraged Smith to study at the Slade. But eventually, he opted for Bristol College of Art, where his lack of formal qualifications was waived on account of what the College recognised as his ‘outstanding promise’.
Education Yeovil Technical College, 1962-1964 Walthamstow College of Art, 1967-1968 Bristol College of Art, 1972-1975
Solo Exhibitions 1973 1974 1975 1980 1982 1990
Mignon Gallery, Bath Park Lane, London Studio Club, Hyde Park Kings Circus Gallery, Bath King Street Gallery, Arts Council, Bristol Leighton House, London
2001 Bruton Gallery, Leeds 2002 Blau Gallery, Palma de Mallorca 2003 Rona Gallery, London 2004 Centre d’Art, Sant Bernat, Palma 2004 Pueblo Español, Matthias Kühn Foundation, Palma de Mallorca 2005 Evento Gallery, Binissalem. Mallorca 2017 Messum's, Cork Street, London
Group Exhibitions 1968 1968 1970 1970 1970 1971 1971 1972 1974 1973 1975 1976 1986 1987 1988 1988 1989 1990 1996 1999 2002 2003 2004
Royal Society of British Artists, London Royal Academy, London Bruton Gallery, Somerset Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Manchester City Art Gallery Bruton Gallery, Somerset John Whibley Gallery, London Bruton Gallery, Somerset Jean Pierre Lehman Gallery, London Royal Academy, London Archer Gallery, London Cardiff City Art Gallery Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Pelter Sands Gallery, Bristol Royal West of England Academy, Bristol Beaux Arts, Bath Blains Fine Art, London Bruton Gallery, Leeds Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London Thompson’s Gallery, London Centre d’Art, Sant Bernat, Palma, Mallorca
Ken Smith’s sculptures are now included in public and private collections in the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, the United States, Japan, China and South Africa.
CDXXXI
ISBN 978-1-910993-23-1 Publication No: CDXXXI Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell Printed by DLM-Creative
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