Sculpture in the Landscape


The sculpture gardens and courtyard at Messums Wiltshire host a collection of contemporary sculptures including site-specific commissions.
Open to the public, 7 days a week

Simon Gudgeon ‘Serenity’

 

One of Britain’s leading contemporary sculptors, Simon Gudgeon has a signature smooth style. His minimalist, semi-abstract forms depict both movement and emotion of a moment captured with a visual harmony that is unmistakably his own.
Born in Yorkshire in 1958, Gudgeon ‘lived deep in the countryside on the family farm, learning the essential arts of observation, evaluation and interpretation of how animals and birds behave, both with each other and man’. Simon starting painting only in his thirties, first exhibiting at London’s Battersea Exhibition Centre in 1992. An impulse purchase of artist’s clay at the age of 40 led into his new career as a sculptor, responding to what lay closest to his heart: the natural world.
Since then Gudgeon has attained worldwide recognition, with exhibitions in London, New York, San Diego, Paris and the Netherlands. His works are featured in important private collections abroad and in the United Kingdom, including those of His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, The Duke of Bedford and The Duke of Northumberland. In addition, he has work in the permanent collection of several prominent art museums in the USA, including America’s National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum.

 

Serenity is inspired by the Egyptian goddess of nature and is 3 metres tall.

David Worthington ‘Spinning Stones’

 

David was drawn to sculpture form a young age. During his pre-primary school period he pinched a penknife from his father and whilst staying with relatives in the country  he picked up a log out walking in the woods. Gouging out holes for the eyes, nose and mouth and he painted them red. It was his first sculpture. Later at the age of 10 he found a “thing” at the back of his history book and asked his art teacher if he could make something like it. It was Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form at the UN building New York. Inspired by a monograph on the Modernist sculptor Jean Arp, at 16 he carved his first piece in stone, continuing with an A level in sculpture.

 

 

From early childhood David was drawn to sculpture, carving, Modernism, design, Science Fiction and the rolling landscape of the Downs. Nature, culture, industry have all remained central to his practice. In his work he explores the relationship between these parts of our existence, pairing different elements together. The natural material stone, is combined with stainless steel , hooks, heating elements, bearings, and paint. So  there is a dialogue between these elements referring to the nature/culture dichotomy.

“Sculpture is a reflection of our bodies emanating from that sculptural ideal within” he says . “I believe in the power of objects to touch people on an emotional level. The audience responds to the work physically. There is an intelligence and knowledge within the body that understands the sculpture before the brain decodes it. People can interact with my sculptures, climb on them, touch, and turn them.”

Working from an old dairy barn studio in Bridport Dorset in the South West of England he combines traditional carving with the latest cutting edge design. He works with stone sourced from throughout the world. He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2009. He is a Fellow of The Royal British Society of Sculptors, and was Vice President in 2010-13.

David has carried out public commissions in the UK, America and Japan, and in 2010 he installed a large public sculpture in Great Queen St, Covent Garden, London for Henderson Global Investors. His work is in the museum the Creative Cities Collection Beijing China. He has had solo shows at the Lefevre Gallery, Sladers Yard, Horatio’s Garden, the William Bennington Gallery, and at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

The two spinning sculptures are made in Zebrino marble from the Carrara mountains. It took sculptor David Worthington a year to find a suitable block of stone.

Laurence Edwards

 

One of the few sculptors who casts his own work, Laurence Edwards is fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process. The driving force behind his work is bronze, an alloy that physically and metaphorically illustrates entropy, the natural tendency of any system in time to tend towards disorder and chaos. His sculptures express the raw liquid power of bronze, its versatility, mass and evolution, and the variety of process marks he retains tell the story of how and why each work came to be.

Based in Suffolk, he trained at Canterbury College of Art and then at the Royal College of Art, where he studied bronze casting and sculpture with Sir Antony Caro. After winning a Henry Moore Bursary, the Angeloni Prize for Bronze Casting and an Intach Travelling Scholarship, he studied traditional casting techniques in India and Nepal, an experience that not only influenced his treatment of form and technique, but also gave him the necessary tools to establish his own atelier.


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Chthonic Head 1

Bronze
110 x 55 x 65cm
Edition of 9

£38,500



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