laurence edwards
A bronze figure on a raft cradled in a steel frame waits to be lowered into Butley Creek. This figure will reappear at the next low tide, and for hundreds, possibly thousands more, before it slowly sinks into the mud. This valediction to a landscape that has fuelled Edwards’s work for the past fifteen years was captured in Philip Cairney’s film, A Thousand Tides available at http://messums.com/films/laurence-edwards.html
laurence edwards 2016 Foreword by
Robert Macfarlane
www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545
Foreword by Robert Macfarlane One June morning I was following a footpath along the edge of a tidal creek near Snape in Suffolk, when across the reeds I saw the dark head of a man: improbably tall, aggressive in his posture, and standing far out on the mud-flat, towards the silver water of the channel. I halted – and it was only when I moved forwards again that I realized there were two other men to the left and right of the first, facing in the same direction, and that all three were naked and that all three were bronze. This was my first encounter with the work of Laurence Edwards, and it stopped me short. The year was 2008, and these were Edwards’ Creek Men: a trio of giants, each eight feet high and a quarter of a ton in weight, stood on an iron raft. Their arms were branches of toxic hemlock, and fungus grew from their shins and shoulders. The surface of their skin was churned as a ploughed field after rain. Their akimbo stances, and the triangular formation of their arrangement, suggested – at least at first glance – a fierce, military intent. Browned and brutal, they seemed recently to have roused themselves, shuddering, from the marshland mud after long torpor. Edwards had made these reed-bed golems in their first form from mud, in fact, modeling the original figures roughly in clay on steel armature, letting the wet clay dry until it was leather-hard, and then beating it into shape using ‘whatever [was] handy; hammers, lengths of wood, fists, shovels’. Once each giant was complete, he moulded plaster around it to create white cases that together contained the negative shape of the clay. These cases Edwards then filled with hot wax, which congealed to recreate the figure in fifteen separate sections. He covered these wax sections in fireable plaster to make new moulds, before placing each plaster mould in a kiln for two days to melt the wax back out of it. At last he had the hollow forms that were ready to receive the molten bronze. The metal was poured glowing into the moulds, then left to cool and harden until the plaster could be smashed and washed away. Each metal body part was then fettled and welded together – and at last the bronze giant emerged. ‘Now when I hammer and sand his chest’, noted Edwards at the time, ‘it rings like a bell’. This is the ‘Lost Wax’ method of bronze casting, and it is both logical and magical. Presence begets absence begets presence begets absence begets presence. Clay becomes bronze; wax becomes smoke; hollow becomes form; brittle plaster impossibly contains liquid metal. Concealment and revelation pursue one another. Undertaken on the scale of the Creek Men, lost-wax casting is
1. Nothing is Final (Let the Wind Blow), 2015
bronze – series of 5 100 x 107 x 42 cms 39 3⁄8 x 421⁄8 x 161⁄2 ins
massively demanding of both patience and physicality on the part of the artist. It has aspects of both ritual and fetish. It unites violence and delicacy: fragile plaster moulds and wax forms are easily damaged, but clay and bronze require forceful, even ferocious shaping. Yes, violence was intrinsic to the making of Edwards’ figures, and their finished bodies retain an aura of this violence: this was what stopped me short that day in June. The Creek Men belong to a broader tradition of once-buried figures summoned from the East Anglian earth, haunting an era that is not theirs. MR James’s ghost stories are filled with such eerie presences, summoned from barrow or collapsing cliff. So too is the nameless king of the Wuffingas, interred in his boat at Sutton Hoo in the late 6th century, and unburied by archaeologists 1300 years later. All of these figures need to be approached with great caution, lest they pull in their wakes pasts – or futures – that we do not wish woken. For all their prima facie fearsomeness, though, I came over time to see the Creek Men not as eldritch paramilitaries set on vengeance, but as more ethically neutral emanations of the Suffolk terrain itself. Made of mud, metal, reed, wood and fungus, they were not just in place but of place. Their gnarled trunks and limbs were oakish rather than orc-ish. Chronic and chthonic, they were indigenes – and there was an aspect of The Creek Men
tolerance to their presence, as well as of threat.
I have followed Edwards’ work with fascination since that first meeting. The sculptures that have drawn me most have all been humanoid figures, and have all in some way been supplemented or burdened by the landscapes of their making. In ‘Carcass Carriers’ (cat. no. 36), men trudge with slaughtered hogs slung on their backs. The ‘Wrecker’ series shows men bearing armfuls of spars sharp as spears. ‘The Carrier’ (cat. no. 30) is a bronze man with a tilted bundle of reeds and branches so disproportionately long that they would surely make progress unmanageable. The figure in ‘Beast of Burden’ is only 20 centimetres high, but the load he carries – a slender twig – is an extraordinary 160 centimetres wide: a funambulist with his pole, perhaps, balancing a fine path through the dark world. ‘Man of Stones’ (cat. no. 20) is freighted down by the rocks and rods that have clumped on his chest, as though he were the magnet and they the metal. ‘Crystal Man’ (cat. no. 10) stands apparently unaware that his torso has begun to crystallize, spiking outwards in
2. Myriad (Evergreen), 2015
bronze – series of 5 110 x 78 x 38 cms 431⁄4 x 30 3⁄4 x 15 ins
chunky polyhedra. The piece recalls JG Ballard’s early catastrophe novel The Crystal World (1966), in which time itself has begun to leak away, resulting in a super-saturation of space, such that anything within the zone of leakage re-iterates itself as pure structure, self-encasing in intricately outgrowing geometries. In many of these works, Edwards casts organic materials – phragmites stalks, leaves, pebbles, hogweed stems – into the pieces. In the ‘Chord’ (cat. no. 12) series, figures barely recognizable as human exist as thatches of bronze, somewhere between bird’s nest and mud-clump, and from the top of each rises a beautifully slender reed – a kind of chord or note made visible, then – tapering vertically skywards for metres. Perhaps the most compelling of all these figures to me is the most conceptual: in ‘The Long Wait’ (cat. no. 37), a muscular figure sits on a stump, head angled down, hands between his legs. From each temple protrudes a crooked thin stick, at least as long as the figure is high. What are these extrusions? Antlers for a human Herne? An atrocious mind-manacle, inserted by an absent authority? Cognition itself externalized, jagging out to right and left? These prostheses and outgrowths that so often extend or impede the human body in Edwards’ work are, I think, expressions in part of his understanding of ‘landscape’ as something that bears hard upon us – that burdens or lightens us, that shapes the edges and textures of our bodies in drastic ways. As the sculptor’s fingers ruck the soft clay, so our landscapes knead and gnarl us. The word ‘landscape’ entered English from the Dutch in the late-sixteenth-century, at which point it carried with it strong associations of stasis, order and artistry. In the course of the 1500s it had become so strongly associated with the Dutch school of landscape painting that – at the moment of its Anglicization – its primary meaning was ‘a painterly depiction of scenery’. It was not used to mean ‘physical terrain’ until as late as 1725. These associations of stasis and passivity persist in contemporary understandings of ‘landscape’ as something to be looked at or driven past: a stage-set or wallpaper for our activities, rather than a force or medium within which we exist and with which we think and feel. As I have said elsewhere, I prefer to imagine ‘landscape’ as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion-causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. It can deplete as well as supplement; leaving our bodies feeling hard and consolidated as crystal – or dispersed and mobile as a flock of birds. Edwards’ most recent work signals a clear change of direction and shift in texture: from the consolidated to the dispersed, from the hard to the mobile, and from the encumbered to the dissolved. His bodies have always escaped themselves in some manner, but where his earlier
3. The Patternist, 2016
bronze – series of 9 64 x 31 x 20 cms 251⁄4 x 121⁄4 x 7 7⁄8 ins
figures have tended to be built up and bulked out, these new figures are made up more of gaps than of joins. In ‘Nothing is Final (Let The Wind Blow)’ (cat. no. 1) from 2015, only a pair of feet remain whole of the figure that once was. The rest of the body has taken flight into metal petals that swirl before the eye, held delicately aloft by a cross-hatch of fine struts. ‘Myriad (Evergreen)’ (cat. no. 2) shows a body leaving itself in two senses: beginning its scattering, and turning itself into leaves. Both are the haunting memento mori of a modern materialist. They remind us of the comfortless immortality that comes from knowing that our bodies are matter, and as such belong to a cycle of dispersal and reconstitution that far exceeds the human lifetime. Dead we are dust, dust we are clay, clay we are bronze. Technically, these new works have brought new challenges. Each begins as a full figure, cast in wax: as Edwards detaches and displaces each piece of the original outwards, the ‘figure slowly dissolves,’ as he puts it, ‘and becomes its own environment’. Structurally, however, such a radical disassembly of form is problematic. There are limits to the degrees of cantilever and suspension that are possible before collapse occurs. It also poses difficulties of casting: to get the bronze to flow through and along these intricate channels, and to ensure an evenness of resilience across the piece, it is necessary almost to feed the bronze into the mould leaf by leaf, petal by petal. The result, though, is startling: spectral figures on the cusp of evaporation, human bodies drastically opened up to the world: pried into pieces by landscape rather than weighed down by it. This new work seems to me to belong to a mystical artistic tradition that flourishes on the very brink of abstraction or abolition, and that joins artists as various as Thomas Merton, St John of the Cross, TS Eliot, Simone Weil and Patrick White. In their shapings around evacuated space, Edwards’ new works practice a sculptural version of apophasis, whereby the ineffable is spoken of only in negative, eluding definition by definition. Viewing them, I thought of the beautiful moment in White’s great 1957 novel Voss, where Laura finds herself depleted to the point of diffusion by the indifference of the Australian desert: ‘... the material part of myself became quite superfluous, while my understanding seemed to enter into wind, earth, the ocean beyond…I was nowhere and everywhere at once. I was destroyed, yet living more intensely than actual sunlight.’ ––––– Robert Macfarlane, January 2016
4. A Scent in Dappled Light, 2016
bronze unique 37 x 40 x 24 cms 145⁄8 x 153⁄4 x 91⁄2 ins
Elements of Form One of the more eye-opening chapters in Randall Munroe’s What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions describes what would actually happen if all the known elements were arranged in a Periodic Table-shaped display case. Leaving aside issues of expense, personal safety, legal liability and the need to breathe, one could safely organise the first two rows. However, the third row might cause spontaneous combustion, which could prove a blessing, as the fourth row would spell certain death. In theory, robot helpers might be able to carry on with the fifth and six rows, but could not withstand the nuclear explosion their efforts would inevitably cause. Finally, Munroe advises: ‘Do not build the seventh row.’ Modern bronze is made up of copper and manganese, which sit snugly on the combustible third row, and a bit of silicon from the relatively calm second row. Seen in the context of the Periodic Table, these elements appear discrete or possibly reactive, but not allied in any way that Laurence Edwards’s sculpture suggests. One of the best examples of this elemental unity is Crouching Man (cat. nos. 5 and 44), which, in its various iterations, it is probably his most internationally recognised work and proves how contemporary sculpture can be classical and present, that it can balance pure form with raw physicality. It can be rational and still draw hand and eye like an open flame. Like almost all Edwards’s sculptures, his Crouching Man series are male nudes whose pose, musculature and scale emphasise psychological potency over masculinity. They are unique works, each cast from moulds that differ in surface treatment and the pose of arms, hands, neck and head. Any
5. Crouching Man III, 2015
bronze – an edition of 9 100 x 75 x 43 cms 393⁄8 x 291⁄2 x 16 7⁄8 ins
6. Evergreen – Large Leaf Figure, 2015
bronze – series of 4 211 x 91 x 93 cms 831⁄8 x 357⁄8 x 365⁄8 ins
7. Grin and Bear, 2012
bronze – series of 6 25 x 20 x 22 cms 10 x 8 x 81⁄2 ins
variation of these elements transforms the work, but this change is most evident in the different casts of the head and how they direct the figure’s “gaze”. Speaking about his new sculptures, Edwards described how he came to see the head as more than a primary physical element of his sculptures; it was potentially the seat of their inner life. As he developed his new deconstructive technique (about which more later) he strove to keep a sense of his figures’ anima, regardless of what and how much he removed. “I always think about what Giacometti said about the body being a prop for the gaze”, he said. “I wrestled with the idea of whether to lose the heads in this series, freeing the sculpture, or to keep them virtually intact, providing a focal point.” Edwards began to liberate his figures, not by losing their heads but by disembodying them as test subjects for experiments in deconstruction. A comparison between Grin and Bear and Head in the Clouds (cat. nos. 7 and 8), which were both inspired by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s character heads, shows how Edwards tested to what extent he could excise physiognomy without sacrificing expression, and how losing a feature altogether could intensify its effect by its absence. Likewise, he partially dissected and reconstituted his walking-man maquettes as Wayfarer I and Wayfarer II (cat. nos. 31 and 32), exchanging arrested movement for a sense of controlled internal combustion; seen together, the figures recall the cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here where two businessmen shake hands as one of them quietly burns. One of the inspirations behind his new technique is the idea of giving form to a natural process. For example, picture a wood fire burning backwards: incandescence would fade as the rising atoms of carbon and carbon dioxide returned to the compound molecules from which they were released. In the
8. Head in the Clouds, 2015
bronze – series of 5 34 x 30 x 16 cms 133⁄8 x 113⁄4 x 61⁄4 ins
9. Shapeshifter, 2015
bronze – series of 5 65 x 30 x 71 cms 255⁄8 x 113⁄4 x 28 ins
11. Grail, 2016
bronze – series of 9 60 x 33 x 19 cms 235⁄8 x 13 x 71⁄2 ins
fading heat, these molecules would reunite, returning the wood to solidity. This concept partly inspired Shapeshifter (cat. no. 9), where Edwards deconstructed a cube and then combined the resulting parts into a complexly extended echo of form that nearly defied the casting process. “I’m really enjoying this”, he said, pointing to the work in its earlier stage. “I cut a shape out, add it to the outside and slowly, the mass changes. Then I cut out the filigree left between the shapes and add it to the extremities. Soon, the mass of the box will completely shift, almost like smoke. I like this idea of transmogrification, one state changing into another.” The result is a work that draws the eye into a conventional space and then gently blows it apart. Shapeshifter represents an important step towards his deconstruction of the human form, and if he were to rework this piece on a human
10. Crystal Man, 2012
bronze – series of 9 58 x 18 x 18 cms 23 x 7 x 7 ins
scale, the effect might be quite different. At its present size, however, the sculpture suggests cherry blossoms caught by a sudden gust of wind: one of those natural occurrences that seem to blur time and space. The language and syntax of the human body, and how it can express something more than the sum of its parts remains the focus of his work. However, his earlier bronzes were almost entirely composed around a core figure, and he now wanted to challenge mass and solidity to express how his sculptures exist in space. Around the beginning of last year, he decided to take a break from modelling complete figures to see just how far he could actually extend his reductivereconstructive method to life-size figures, stating: “I’m modelling body parts in order to construct life-size figures to do things to. They’ll exist in wax and I’ll work on them, add things, take them away, etc.”
12. Chord 1, 2, and 3, 2015
unique bronze 320 x 47 x 25 cms 126 x 181⁄2 x 97⁄8 ins
13. Before the Dawn (Rollover), 2016
bronze – series of 4 39 x 39 x 39 cms 153⁄8 x 153⁄8 x 153⁄8 ins
His most audaciously reductive works in this vein include A Smile Rendered and Rendered Arm (cat. nos. 43 and 46) in which he distilled form, features and musculature to the most basic linear markers of a head or an arm: sculpture as “vitrified drawing”. But by reducing form and mass to pure line, he created new structural challenges: namely, how to support such works without clouding their essential lines with struts. One solution he arrived at was to incorporate supportive elements that could be read as connective tissue, or suggest movement. Edwards has a remarkably sophisticated command of anatomy, even for a sculptor whose subject is the figure. What is more, his knowledge is informed by a sincere respect for the human body, curiosity about other people, and by examining ancient models. “I was re-reading Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Nude,” he said recently. “I love that book, it’s set in a ‘50s time warp [but] his poetic analysis of the Apollo and Venus forms, the narrative from Greece to the Renaissance, is a great journey.” Part of the distinctive power of his sculpture derives from the fact that he balances actual anatomy with art-historical canons, often creating dissonances in his figures that enhance their sense of humanity. For example, he based several earlier series on a figure type inspired by a photograph of a nude Inuit man published in a Victorian anthropology book with all the dehumanising objectivity one might expect of that age. Edwards was so impressed by the dignity of the man’s expression and his strong, compact body, that he made this image the basis for several works including Standing for Something (cat. no. 14) and Catcher (cat. no. 22). While some of his new sculptures are based on this earlier Inuit type, he also developed two new ur-figures, inspired
14. Standing for Something, 2012
bronze – edition of 9 95 x 37 x 23 cms 373⁄8 x 145⁄8 x 9 ins
15. River Man, 2015
bronze – series of 6 49 x 101 x 35 cms 191⁄4 x 39 3⁄4 x 133⁄4 ins
16. Falls the Shadow, 2016
bronze – series of 4 170 x 63 x 50 cms 667⁄8 x 243⁄4 x 195⁄8 ins
fig. 1: Andrea Mantegna Lamentation (c. 1480; Pinocoteca di Brera, Milan) respectively by the Anavysos Kouros (fig. 2) and the foreshortened figure of Christ in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation (fig. 1). The Kouros, like most Archaic Period Greek sculpture, has a completely direct gaze, is inherently stable and canonically proportioned, making it an ideal springboard for an over-life-size standing figure. Edwards modified the armoured proportions of the Kouros to reflect actual musculature and created a figure type, the core of several large works including Changing Man, Borrowed Breath and Falls the Shadow (cat nos. 29, 17 and 16): “I’ve based him on a kouros, the head looking straight ahead to set the figure in the present. The hands create a wonderful resolution to the arm and ending a line is always so hard. I also made a slight reduction in scale to emphasise the thighs, and I love the way the forearms echo the calves.” Conversely, Mantegna’s lack of correct proportion (which only compounds the pathos of his painting) inspired Edwards to model a prone figure whose gaze is directed down along the body. “I had been thinking about this for a while in relation to one of my figures”, he said. “I’ve always understood Mantegna to have been at the forefront of perspectival developments, and this is an example of him not getting it quite right; the feet should to all intents and purposes be much larger and the head smaller.” Edwards modelled his figure to be proportional and anatomically accurate, but wanted to recreate something of Mantegna’s expressive fig. 2: Anavysos Kouros (c. 530 BCE; National Archaeological Museum, Athens)
tension, so he gently lifted and tilted the head. Cast in its entirety, this figure became Mind over Matter (cat. no. 19), a Lazarus whose gaze
17. The Borrowed Breath, 2016
bronze – series of 5 192 x 159 x 58 cms 755⁄8 x 625⁄8 x 227⁄8 ins
can appear direct or introspective, depending upon whether one reads the work horizontally or vertically. In its transitional form, this figure became River Man (cat. no. 15). Like all of his large bronzes, he began Mind over Matter by modelling kilos of clay mixed with Suffolk moss and grass on a basic metal armature. Initially, he did not intend to cast this figure as an independent work, but found the experience of modelling it so sympathetic, “like tending a patient”, that it inspired him, with the help of his friend Tobias Ford, to develop a cantilevered armature on which to model large figures horizontally and vertically. He could now realise any of his clay figures standing or prone, and modify them as they developed. After his usual process, he then made sectioned plaster and rubber moulds of the clay figure to be cast and reunited in wax versions he could “use and abuse to develop new ideas”. With a surgeon’s care and attention, he progressively cut out sections of the wax figure with a hot knife, creating voids and traceries that could, by their absence, actually emphasise the original figure’s form and expression. For Falls the Shadow and Hollow Man (cat. nos. 16 and 24) he rearranged the disembodied sections of his Inuit and kouros figure types separately (but not independently) and cast the bronze in two sections: the partially translucent figure, and the solid shadow of its fugitive form. As he explained: “I had this idea for a while, to remove the cut-outs from the figure and attach them to the wall behind, acting as a sort of shadow, a transfer of material from a form to a plane.” Following this idea of altering form from one state to another, he dissolved his Lazarus figure, suggesting the essential fluidity of the human body, and cast it in a smaller version as
18. Leaf Man Standing, 2016
bronze – series of 9 66 x 34 x 25 cms 26 x 133⁄8 x 9 7⁄8 ins
19. Mind Over Matter (Lying Man), 2016
bronze – series of 5 126 x 183 x 61 cms 495⠄8 x 72 x 24 ins
The Borrowed Breath, 2016 (cat. no. 17) bronze – series of 5 192 x 159 x 58 cms 755⁄8 x 625⁄8 x 227⁄8 ins
River Man. In The Borrowed Breath, he kept the legs and head of his kouros, but diffracted the rest of the figure into a cloudlike aura. In Evergreen, the head is now apparent only by its absence, while the body unfolds into vertical paddles like cactus stems. For Nothing in Final, he diffused almost all evidence of the original figure and rearranged it laterally, as if driven by an external force, effectively making solid appear evanescent. Transforming any large clay figure to appear as a solid bronze requires first recreating it as a cast-wax version and then cutting it into workable sections, which are each filled with a core of clay or sand. Wax rods are then attached to each section forming runners for the molten bronze and risers that allow gases to escape. A plaster mould is then formed in layers around each section. When this mould is fired in the kiln, the wax is effectively lost, making space for the molten bronze. Upon opening the moulds, the cooled sections are welded back together, reincarnating the original handmodelled clay as a bronze figure branched by a vascular system of residual rods formed by the runners and risers. Traditionally, sculptors remove these rods, along with most process marks, but Edwards has never been interested in refinement for its own sake. (Even the rolling-rock containment of Crouching Man obscures just enough of the body to still invite interpretation.) Moreover, because the casting process feeds how he realises form, he often leaves traces, like visible seams or
20. Man of Stones, 2013
unplugged pinholes, to indicate a figure’s essence and evolution.
Likewise, he incorporates more obvious leftovers, like casting
bronze – series of 9 94 x 33 x 25 cms 37 x 13 x 9 7⁄8 ins
rods, to support additional elements that can transform the core figure into something mythical or allegorical. In Catcher, Edwards turned his Inuit into Icarus by giving him outstretched arms thickly hung with grasses and moss; in High Tide (cat. no. 23), he hid his
21. Sylvan Man, 2016
bronze – series of 5 142 x 139 x 66 cms 557⁄8 x 543⁄4 x 26 ins
left 22. Catcher, 2013
bronze – series of 9 94 x 119 x 25 cms 37 x 467⁄8 x 9 7⁄8 ins
figure almost entirely within a wooden cocoon. The openwork sections in both these sculptures required intricate rubber moulds, and in general, more complex casting processes, but processes nevertheless based on building form rather than deconstructing it. However, his new method demanded he construct entire figures in discrete pieces of fragile wax, which posed unexpected challenges. One hot summer morning last year, he arrived at the studio to find his preparatory wax for Evergreen collapsed into pieces on the floor, leaving him to decide, “… whether to abandon the project and start again (something I couldn’t contemplate) or to treat this as a conservation project, to cast all the broken pieces individually and reconstruct the sculpture in bronze, using the experience to add a layer to the work.” Given his fascination with the concept of entropy, Edwards’s decision was inevitable, but transforming his figure from an apparent solid to a series of discrete elements also pointed ways toward developing larger, more complex sculptures. Previously, he had conceived his most ambitious bronzes specifically, to exist in nature, evolve with it and effectively embody randomness within a
opposite 23. High Tide, 2014
closed system. As he explored the potential of his reductive/additive
point, geometric measure of pattern interpreted in the 16th Century
bronze – series of 9 58 x 40 x 28 cms 227⁄8 x 153⁄4 x 11 ins
technique, however, he returned to his interest in the quincunx: a five-
24. Hollow Man, 2016
bronze – series of 9 126 x 53 x 32 cms 495⁄8 x 207⁄8 x 125⁄8 ins
25. Lattice, 2016
bronze – series of 9 64 x 31 x 20 cms 251⁄4 x 121⁄4 x 77⁄8 ins
as a kind of cosmic building block. “For a long time now the quincunx has niggled me. But this time, I feel the new fracturing-fragmentation method I’ve developed might open up some new territory.” This literal return to form inspired The Patternist and Apophenic Man (cat. nos. 3 and 26), where he tessellated his core figure into diamond shapes, dissolving the original anatomy into something more schematic, but no less tensile. In fact, these works almost read as emblematic trees and this is no coincidence. The patterned geometry of these sculptures, and more directly Lattice (cat. no. 25), was also inspired by Ethiopian Coptic crosses, which, uniquely for Christian objects, were once believed to have healing powers, to be worthy of devotion in their own right, and even thought to be alive. For over a decade Edwards has worked out of Butley Mills, a collection of repurposed farm buildings and grain silos on the reed banks of Butley Creek in Suffolk, near Snape. Together with other artists, he grew Butley into a collection of studios with a foundry, a kiln and a surprisingly cosy pub. “It’s run as an artist community where I train assistants and run internships based on the old atelier system. [It’s] a place where artists not only learn about the casting and foundry process, but also where they can build their businesses and develop their philosophies.” A few years ago, he acquired an old fire station at Saxmundham, which he converted into a studio for his preparatory modelling, and works there every morning. Last year, while he developed his kouros and Lazarus figures, artist Laura Ellenberger captured their evolution in eerily layered photographs using cardboard pinhole cameras installed throughout the main studio. Her sepia images show these figures as nuclei surrounded by blurred vortices of their
26. Apophenic man (The Seer of Patterns that Don’t Exist), 2016
bronze – series of 5 100 x 72 x 28 cms 393⁄8 x 283⁄8 x 11 ins
progress: hands modelling clay or applying plaster, the sparks and traceries of welding, etc. The direction of Edwards’s work and his growing number of collectors has long necessitated he work from a larger, more integrated space. Last spring he took possession of an industrial unit in Halesworth and is now converting this hangar-like space into a dedicated studio-foundry that will allow him to cast one of his life-size figures in two sections (currently, such works demand at least nine). Electric roller doors, movable hoists, bridge cranes and kilns are now being installed and this June, Edwards and his team hope to make the final move from Butley. Space was always at a premium at Butley (and what there was often posed its own hazards), but its limitations also encouraged an impressively collegiate atmosphere that any visitor could sense immediately. The adjacent reed beds became an outdoor gallery where Edwards could show largescale sculptures to dramatic effect and by casting his work there he became part of the fabric of Butley’s ancient past. (Ancient bronze axe heads and “founders’ hoards” have been uncovered nearby, indicating the presence of itinerant BronzeAge smiths.) So in homage to Butley Mills, for all it has given him and for what it will hopefully continue to foster in other artists, Edwards cast A Thousand Tides (fig. 3) to “give back to the Creek”. On the 22nd of March at high tide, this year, he and his team floated a raft on the intertidal Creek and lowered the bronze on to it to be revealed hours later as the tide receded: a process that will repeat daily until the figure sinks into the mud, perhaps one day, to be rediscovered, like the Saxon ship burials found in neighbouring estuaries.
27. Creek Head, 2014
bronze – series of 5 56 x 33 x 26 cms 22 x 13 x 101⁄4 ins
28. Changing Man, 2016
bronze – series of 9 56 x 41 x 23 cms 22 x 161⁄8 x 9 ins
29. Looking Forward, Facing Back, 2015
bronze – edition of 6 187 x 29 x 27 cms 735⁄8 x 113⁄8 x 105⁄8 ins
In less than a year, Edwards completed this exhibition, began developing his new studio, and collaborated with filmmaker Philip Cairney on a documentary recording his technique and valediction to Butley Mills. Edwards’s creative and physical energy is impressive by any standards; what is truly exceptional is his intellectual generosity. He is genuinely interested in how other people see the world and any conversation with him is a two-way street. Many artists are somewhat guarded about their inspirations and practice, but Edwards is so open and engaging about his own work that visits to his studio often leave non-artists with a delicious sense of gate-crashing. Afternoons spent watching these sculptures evolve and hearing him describe their development feel like sneaking into a cinema in the 1890s, or haunting a café with one of the more amusing existentialists. Bronze is, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘The respectable material par excellence, notoriously perennial and well-established’. The key word here is notoriously. Levi knew bronze had never been a fixed medium, and as a chemist and writer he both understood the Periodic Table and recognised its inherent poetry. The Table shows each element as a single, unique square arranged in vertical rows according to atomic weight. Throughout, gaps small and wide await the discovery of actual, but as yet unknown elements. Now much expanded from Dmitri Mendeleev’s original version, the Periodic Table clarified the relationships and reactions that determine matter and predicted the existence of unknown elements. Empirically, it proves that the physical world is no more definitive than our grasp of it. Metaphorically, it helps us understand how we are actually alloyed matter and our only constants are complexity fig. 3: The final resting place of A Thousand Tides
and interdependence.
30. The Carrier, 2013
bronze – series of 4 196 x 546 x 89 cms 77 x 215 x 35 ins
above left
31. Wayfarer 1, 2015 bronze – series of 9 57 x 30 x 16 cms 221⁄2 x 113⁄4 x 61⁄4 ins
Levi experienced the worst mankind had to offer, survived it, and still believed in humanity’s undiscovered potential. His marriage of language, psychological insight and science is best known from the stories and biographical sketches he published in 1975 as The Periodic Table: Edwards repeatedly noted how one story from this book, Carbon, spoke to him in a
above right
way that continues to influence his work. “We’re all just borrowed carbon,
32. Wayfarer 2, 2015
really”, he said. “It’s like that carbon atom in Levi’s story, freed from the
bronze – series of 9 55 x 30 x 26 cms 215⁄8 x 113⁄4 x 101⁄4 ins
limestone by pickaxe and fire, airborne, travelling in a moth’s eye…” Edwards’s deconstruction and reformation of his figures is overtly elemental and presents the human form in a way that both mirrors and diffracts how we see ourselves. His sculptures show us what we think we know about the human figure, and indeed bronze sculpture, only to play with and confound our expectations. Nevertheless, we emerge having learned something about how we are made and why: by evolving his technique to explore what each sculpture can express, Edwards often omits the figure’s head, but never its human core. Andrea Gates Director
33. The Gift, 2016
bronze – series of 9 59 x 33 x 25 cms 231⁄4 x 13 x 9 7⁄8 ins
right
34. Bubble Wrap I, 2015
bronze – series of 9 89 x 66 x 36 cms 35 x 26 x 14 ins
left
35. Bubble Wrap II, 2015
bronze – series of 9 83 x 41 x 43 cms 323⁄4 x 16 x 17 ins
36. Carcass Carrier I, 2009
bronze – edition of 6 66 x 49 x 29 cms 26 x 191⁄4 x 113⁄8 ins
37. The Long Wait (study), 2009
bronze – edition of 9 50 x 87 x 28 cms 191⁄4 x 341⁄4 x 11 ins
left
38. The White Torso, 2014
bronze – series of 6 151 x 30 x 26 cms 591⁄2 x 113⁄4 x 101⁄4 ins
opposite right
39. Brooding Man I (large), 2012
bronze – edition of 8 183 x 66 x 58 cms 72 x 26 x 22 7⁄8 ins
opposite left
40. Brooding Man II (large), 2012
bronze – edition of 8 178 x 58 x 58 cms 70 x 23 x 23 ins
Considering bronzes in their final stages. The ‘Metal shed’, Butley. Image by Tim Bowden.
41. Fragmented Head, 2014
42. Visor, 2015
bronze – series of 5 30 x 23 x 23 cms 113⁄4 x 9 x 9 ins
bronze – series of 9 19 x 10 x 12 cms 71⁄2 x 37⁄8 x 43⁄4 ins
43. A Smile Rendered, 2015
bronze – series of 4 50 x 30 x 25 cms 195⁄8 x 113⁄4 x 97⁄8 ins
44. Crouching Man Maquette (study), 2014
45. The Participants, 2013
bronze – series of 15 15 x 7 x 12 cms 57⁄8 x 21⁄2 x 43⁄4 ins
46. Rendered Arm, 2015 bronze – unique 30 x 64 x 12 cms 113⁄4 x 251⁄4 x 43⁄4 ins
bronze -– series of 9 3 pieces. Left to right in image: 35.6 x 22.8 x 8.9cm 14 x 9 x 31⁄2 ins 29.2 x 21.6 x 22.6 cms 111⁄2 x 81⁄2 x 4 ins 30.5 x 19.7 x 57.4 cms 12 x 73⁄4 x 41⁄2 ins
A Film in One Frame I met Laurence Edwards on a whim after prising his email address from Messums Gallery in Cork Street shortly after moving from Sydney to London. His generosity was immediately evident in the way he welcomed me and fellow artist Harrie Fasher at Butley Foundry and later, his studio. This artistic connection has developed as steadily as my scattered pinhole cameras bear witness to the developing sculptures in the studio. Figures growing out of sheets of green wax. Features forming out of the lumps of clay supported by welded armatures. The history of this time based process is evident in the delicate patina of silver in the light sensitive paper emulsion. The cameras, in excess of fifteen range from sweet tins, shoe boxes, cake tins and small Camera Obscuras, and more recently to old Box Brownies with lens wide open. I fix many ‘exposing units’ to metal beams in the welding shed with strong magnets. The exposures range from 30 minutes to three weeks and longer. Some are set high up and others at precarious compositional places. Through trial and error a visual language is developing and continuing to do so. His sculptures capture my imagination. In response, my aim is to visually grasp the studio and its contents, which are predominantly static, and through time, infusing the presence of the working artist through the act of creating. And so, impregnating the image with a tangible presence and energy which cannot be seen, but felt. Laura Ellenberger 2016
Moving For the last 25 years, I have built ‘shared’ studios and foundries with wonderful artists, who, together with incredible landscape, have nourished me. With the mud of the creek now permanently lodged under my nails, and life-long friendships made, I feel the need for exposure to a new experience. I have secured an industrial space on the edge of a nearby town. ‘Unit 19’ offers 5000 sq feet of potential. It sits amidst containers, pallets and forgotten amenity land, reminding me of a wonderful book by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts called Edgelands. Here, I am building a larger foundry, I will have a two-tonne crane and furnaces, tripling capacity. Tantalised and daunted, I wonder where I shall find my nature. Will I find goldfinches in the thistles under the pylons, or will a fox surprise me between the skips? Laurence Edwards
This catalogue is dedicated to
Rachel and John Massey, and the people of the Creek.
Biography 1967
• Born Suffolk.
1985–88
• Studies Sculpture at Canterbury College of Art, Kent; tutors include Richard Rome, Anthony Caro and John Gibbons.
1988–90
• Postgraduate, Royal College of Art, London; studies casting with Sri Lankan Master Founder Tissa Ranasinghe; studies Bronze Casting and Sculpture with Philip King, Professor of Sculpture, and Eduardo Paolozzi. • Awarded a Henry Moore Bursary, the Angeloni Prize, and an Intach Travelling Scholarship, enabling him to travel during the summers of 1989 and 1990 throughout the Indian sub-continent to study traditional methods of bronze casting and to work alongside Indian sculptors.
1990
• Establishes first foundry and studio at Clock House, Bruisyard, Suffolk.
1991
• Exhibits Nature Morte series in the coastal marshland near Aldeburgh Suffolk.
1992
• Builds bronze foundry and establishes Yew Tree Farm Studios artistic community. • Solo show, The Crypt Gallery, London.
1994
• Solo exhibition Laurence Edwards: Interior Motives at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich.
2001
• Works with photographer Mark Limbrick on the ‘Panocamera’ funded by the Arts Council. • Breaking the Mould, Tate Partnership exhibition, Norwich Castle. • Projection 1, installed in the grounds of the University of Surrey.
2002
• The Naked Truth, a Tate Partnership exhibition at the Fermoy Gallery, Kings Lynn. • Included in The Darkened World exhibition at the Britten Pears Gallery, Aldeburgh Festival, which also featured the work of Sidney Nolan and Bill Woodrow. • Exhibits at Artevent, Eindhoven, Holland. • Solo exhibition at the Lynn Strover Gallery, Cambridge. • Exhibits in About Face at The Croydon Clocktower, London, alongside works by Rodin, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Frink, Antony Gormley & Tracey Emin. • Sets up Gallery 26, a small experimental exhibition space in Yoxford, Suffolk showing and curating regularly for next four years.
2003
• Moves the studios from Yew Tree, to Butley, in East Suffolk, builds larger foundry and expands studio facilities. • Curates Land & Light exhibition at Wingfield Arts, Suffolk. • Against the Tide, 15ft sculpture commissioned by Ipswich Borough Council, for the River Gipping.
1995
2004
1996
2005
• Solo exhibition Recent Sculpture at the Delfina Studios Gallery, London. • Solo exhibition at the Hannah Peschar Gallery, Surrey, featuring the Predicament series.
1997
• Disembodied; Exhibition exploring the Human Form at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich. • Sets up the first USA-UK Iron Pour workshops and symposium at Yew Tree Farm Studios with Coral Lambert and Eligah Sproles from ‘Franconia Sculpture Park’, Minnesota. • Exhibits in Young British Sculptors at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath. • Works in St Petersburg, and exhibits in An English Perspective at the Union of Artists.
1998
• Appointed Artist-in-Residence for the Bury St Edmunds Festival. • Projections: New Sculptures by Laurence Edwards exhibition at St Edmundsbury Cathedral. • Solo exhibitions at the Chappel Galleries, Essex and at Rufford Country Park, Nottinghamshire. • Included in the Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath.
1999
• Exhibits in the Iron Sculptors exhibition at the Grounds for Sculpture, New Jersey, and in the Ferrocious exhibition at the Bodyworks Gallery, Chicago.
2000
• Works with artist Les Bicknell on Meridian, a Millennium public art commission project in Louth, Lincolnshire. • Organises the Ferrindipity Iron Pour at Franconia Sculpture Park, Minnesota. • Stations of the Cross series commissioned as part of the The New Sacred Art Project; Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery. • Solo exhibitions at the John Russell Gallery, Ipswich and the Lynn Strover Gallery, Cambridge.
• Messum’s, Cork Street, London, commissions 9ft bronze of Predicament 1. • Starts part-time lecturing in Critical Studies at Norwich School of Art. • Messum’s commissions three life-size figures and starts to represent the artist. • Arts Council fund his Shopped project. • Wins the Royal Society of Portrait Sculpture Award for Grin and Bear.
2007
• Three figures from the Surrender to the Gaze series are permanently sited, Suffolk coast. • Starts to work on Giants, a new series of large figure bronzes.
2008
• First phase of ‘Creek Men’ project completed. Three 8ft bronze men floated and towed on a raft up the River Alde in Suffolk, for the Aldeburgh Festival. • Aldeburgh Films produce documentary, BBC Radio 4 interview, BBC TV feature. • Sculptor-in-Residence, at The National Casting Centre, Alfred University, New York State, USA. • Orion, 8ft bronze installed on private land, Lourdes, Pyrenees.
2009
• First publication, Creek Men, a Journey, introduced by Christopher Le Brun RA. Launch spring 2009 with Aldeburgh Literary Festival. Accompanied by Solo Exhibition, Aldeburgh Gallery. • Elected Member Royal Society of British Sculptors.
2010
• Solo show at Messum’s, Cork Street and included in Messum’s Sculpture Weekend, Lord’s Wood. • Included in British Society of Portrait Sculptors exhibition, Cork Street. • Included in ‘Naked’ group show, Brompton Road Gallery, London Royal Society of British Sculptors. • Included in Watermarks, a book by Ian Collins, published autumn 2010.
2011
• Purchased New Studio, an ex fire station, Saxmundham (in addition to Butley). • Society British Portrait Sculptors, Cork St. • Royal Academy Summer Show. • (In)visible mixed show (4 artists) Edel Assanti, Vauxhall Bridge Rd, London. • Art Fairs: San Fransisco, Toronto, 20-21 British Art Fair, RCA, London • Ex Lecturers Show, New University Campus Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk. • Lord’s Wood Sculpture Show, Messum’s, Marlow. • Featured in Making Waves: East Anglian Artists by Ian Collins • Artists and People, Green Pebble Publications.
2012
• East Coast Show, 8 East Anglian artists, Messum’s, Cork St, London (Feb) • Art at the Edge, Olympic touring show, (2012 venues below) • Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Oxo Tower, London Southbank. • Contemporary Perspectives, Mall Galleries, London. (group show, April) • Beast of Burden, 14ft wide sculpture installed on the alter at Blythburgh Church, Suffolk. • The Figure, 4 man show, Messum’s, Cork St, London (Spring). • Society of British Portrait Sculptors, Cork St, London (Spring). • Exchange, 2 man show with Maggi Hambling, Lynne Strover Gallery, Cambridge (Summer). • Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. • Sculptors’ Drawings, Pangolin, King’s Place, London (September).
2013
• Jan/Feb. Exhibition Sala Pares Gallery, Barcelona. • Feb. Exhibition McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. • Feb/March. 2 man show with Dominic Welch, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. • Solo show, Messum’s, Cork St, London. • Messum’s Sculpture Weekend, Lord’s Wood, (Opening 21st June – through the summer by appointment) selection of new large works to coincide with Cork St. exhibition. • Dedication of new alterpiece at Blythburgh Church Suffolk. Service on 26th May. • Final installation of 12 Chimp sculptures at ‘Dryland’, 96 High St, Kensington, June (open to the public).
2014
• East Anglian Artists, Messums, Cork St . • Figuring, Three man show Royal society of Sculptors, Kensington • Naked Clay, Hull • Installed ‘Carrier’ Lake Zurich Switzerland. • Toronto, Art Fair • 20–21 Art Fair RCA, London.
2015
• Solo show ‘ Mossgreen’, Armadale, Melbourne, Australia. • Solo show ‘Mossgreen’, Rushcutters bay, Sydney. • Guest Artist, ‘Cley Contemporary’ Cley next to Sea Norfolk. • Prize winner ‘Society of British Sculptors’ London. • Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi - Sydney. • Winner of the ‘Macquarie sculpture prize’. Sculpture by the sea. • Sydney and Toronto Art Fairs.
2016
• Solo show ‘Messums’, Cork St London.
CDXI
ISBN 978-1-910993-03-3 Publication No: CDXI 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 Printed by DLM-Creative Photography: Douglas Atfield, Tim Bowden, Steve Russell
www.messums.com
A Thousand Tides, 2016 Filmmaker Philip Cairney spent three months filming Laurence Edwards at work in his studios in Suffolk. This film records, in Edwards’s own words, the story behind A Thousand Tides, the sculpture he specifically made in tribute to Butley Creek, and provides invaluable insights into his new work and practice.
A Thousand Tides