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Articles>Laurence Edwards
If a documentary were to be made of sculptor Laurence Edwards at work, the
score underpinning the footage would be a rousing philharmonic masterpiece
complete with spine-tingling choir and great shuddering drum rolls. For, right
now, everything in Laurence Edwards’ bronzen world is epic. And it’s
only going to get larger.
Last
summer Laurence Edwards unveiled his 8-ft ‘Creek Men’; three great
hulking bronze giants who appeared silently on a raft amongst the reeds at
Snape in Suffolk and stood sentinel there, rising and falling with the tides,
for the duration of the 61st Aldeburgh Festival. No sooner had these giants
been delivered than Laurence was planning his next works. Bigger bronzes.
Nine foot tall this time; taller, if possible. So tall, he may have to build
a new foundry to accommodate this explosion of dimension.
To get Laurence’s eight-foot bronzes from conception to their location
at Snape Maltings required equal – and large - measures of brain and
brawn. First came kilos of clay which Laurence transformed into his unsettling
men-shapes. This was followed by the creation of plaster moulds, then wax,
then more plaster. Finally, each mould had to be cast in relatively small
sections – the crucible can only carry 80 kilos of bronze at a time
– which meant the pieces had to be welded back together afterwards.
Laurence doesn’t hazard a guess as to the weight of each finished piece
but they’re ungainly enough to required pulleys and the help of other
Butley Mill artists to lift them.
Balanced on a raft and overlooking ancient Saxon burial mounds, the Creek
Men finally set sail on a foggy summer’s morning along the watercourse
from Slaughden Quay to the reed beds of Snape.
Away from the noise of the foundry and surrounded by the muted colours of
reeds, water and countryside, the Creek Men finally achieved what Laurence
had dreamed of when he started the project 18 months earlier: a coming home
to the land that had spawned them.
Imposing and rough, these disquieting creatures are both of the earth and
yet not of this earth. They may have been created using materials gathered
from the countryside – branches, grasses, leaves and fungi were added
to the clay prior to firing and casting – but the final products are
solid and arresting, looming out of the reeds like scouts from an invading
army, their torsos scarred by past hardships, their faces swollen.
This dichotomy excites Laurence. ‘To travel up Benjamin Britten’s
river, the river of Peter Grimes,’ he writes in Creek Men –
The Voyage, ‘with figures redolent of a Saxon age, made of bronze,
cast using near obsolete methods, for me bridged the space between the modern
and the old world.’
Given the misshapen and menacing primordial beings that occupy his subconscious,
Laurence seems a surprisingly balanced and good-natured man. He shares the
foundry with a number of fellow artists and there is a comfortable, upbeat
buzz to his studio as young and old in dusty overalls go to work with band
saws, grinders and welding equipment. Laurence’s banter is light-hearted
and easy. Some might even describe him as jolly.
Physically, the only part of Laurence’s body that even remotely resembles
his ravaged creations is his bandaged big toe. He injured it over the weekend
and it has left him wearing open-toed sandals and walking with a slight limp.
He was born in East Bergholt near Colchester in Suffolk but grew up in Snape
where the reeds were his playground. He has continued to live in the region
most of his life, leaving only to complete his education: a foundation course
at Lowestoft College which he describes as ‘the best thing that could
have happened to me’; a graduate course at Canterbury College of Art
and a postgraduate course at Royal College of Art in London; and a tour of
India and Nepal studying traditional bronze casting methods.
His grandfather was a butcher in Eye and his father, a banker, was ‘a
man of nature’. Laurence describes his parents as consummate storytellers;
people ‘who liked the blarney’.
Perhaps these are clues to his work?
Laurence is certainly comfortable about marrying art with death. He grew up
respectful of his grandfather’s trade and has no compunction about studying
dead creatures in order to improve his understanding of anatomy. Having set
up his first foundry in Suffolk’s Bruisyard in the early 1990s so that
he could make a living casting sculptures for other artists, he was unable
to afford live models and so began modeling and casting the dead animals he
found in the marshes. These led to his Nature Morte series and to
the realization that his art was about metamorphism; he could take dead animals
and transform them into a new state of being, injecting them with a different
type of life.
‘Butchering a dead animal like a deer is like having a portal open up
in front of you,’ he explains. ‘It’s like unzipping a suitcase
and finding the organs, which are much the same as our own, and you realize
how similar we all are. It gives you an incredible bond with the animal world.’
Does this mean that, given the opportunity, he would study human bodies in
a similar manner?
‘I wouldn’t have a problem handling the bodies,’ he says,
‘but the problem is how this would be perceived. It’s rather melodramatic,
isn’t it? But a dead body on a slab doesn’t tell us much, whereas
delving into the workings of the body of a deer is educationally rewarding.’
Therein lies Laurence’s rationale – he doesn’t study dead
animals because they’re dead. He studies dead animals because they keep
still. As far as he is concerned, a living human model will always provide
a more accurate insight into how the anatomy works than a body that is rigid.
Laurence is no stranger to drama. In the early 1990s he weathered the misconception
that his bronze animals were the animals themselves, their skeletons and flesh
burnt off in the casting process. This was not the case, he says firmly. He
cast his sculptures from clay. The original animals continued to reside in
the studio’s chest freezer, uncast.
Then, in 1993, there followed the incident of the ‘Squatting Woman’.
By this time Laurence had started producing half life-size bronzes and was
invited to exhibit in the garden of Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. Unfortunately,
some of the pieces - particularly one of a naked headless female torso squatting
with legs splayed - drew a strong and negative response from the public.
Laurence is semi-apologetic about Squatting Woman, on the one hand remarking
on what a powerful piece it was but on the other acknowledging that it was
the product of his ‘young man’ stage.
In fact, Laurence hadn’t intended to produce a disembodied torso. He
had been experimenting with the creation of larger figures and ‘bits
kept dropping off’ his pieces. Hence, the squatting woman lost her head.
And because Laurence had his own foundry, there was no limit to what he could
cast in his exploration of shape and form. The broken pieces and the armature
they exposed were of interest in their own right and as a result, the squatting
woman was ‘a culmination of things being destroyed and things being
built’.
It was this line of enquiry which would eventually lead him to his giants.
Over the next fifteen years his interest progressed from disembodied parts
to distorted limbs and torsos; to religious iconography; to ancient cultures;
to nature’s cycles; to the relationship between organic and human forms.
And throughout, he explored issues relating to art: what it means to be an
artist; how the simple act of exhibiting a piece can impact and change that
piece; and the relevance of art to his life.
In 2002, having moved to the new foundry in rural Butley where the lands were
steeped with Saxon history, he entered his most productive period yet. Going
for long walks, he began collecting bits of nature – leaves, grasses
and seeds – and impregnating small wax models with them. When he cast
these, he was delighted to find that he could see the landscape replicated
in the contours of his forms. Better still, they resonated with the season
in which they were created.
He introduced protruding armatures to his sculptures as metaphors for the
internal workings of the mind. These were gradually replaced by organic matter
such as branches, sticks, reeds and twigs; metaphors for man’s relationship
with ‘self’ and the land. Soon woodland and marshland became an
integral part of Laurence’s sculptures, adding texture and character
as the works themselves continued to grow in scale.
Standing outside his studio on a spot which used to be an ancient Saxon port,
he points to one of his smaller pieces, Creek, as it rises from the
reeds into the sunlight like a morphed bird of prey. Creek is an
early example of how, instead of using only clay, Laurence packed organic
matter together to form a shape which was then molded and fired. This approach
to casting produced a bronze skin that was far too cumbersome and heavy to
be practical, but it proved to him that it was possible to infuse his larger
forms with the essence of the ancient Britons and their countryside.
Armed with this knowledge, he launched into his next commission – an
8-foot bronze of Orion being guided by Cedalion, to be sited in the
foothills of the Pyrenees in France.
Given that 25% of what Laurence casts goes back into the melting pot, one
of his greatest challenges has always been to find a way to minimize cost
and effort. He doesn’t set to work immediately on the life-sized pieces.
Whereas artists and painters may work from drawings, Laurence will work from
small bronze maquettes.
During the making of Orion he also devised a way of casting countless
figures from a single clay model.
‘I wanted to develop a sculpture that would never have an end,’
he explains. ‘So I built a large figure that could stay with me for
years to come. This figure is developed, cast and then the surviving clay
is reworked into a new figure. It evolves as I evolve.’ These were to
become the Creek Men.
Above his head, the mould sets of three of his giants hang like trapped exo-skeletons
in builders’ bags from the rafters. Below them, the clay model that
spawned these figures bulges from beneath layers of sacking and plastic, its
arms somewhat akimbo, its belly larger than its chest, conveying size and
vulnerability as opposed to testosterone.
‘The clay does dry out,’ Laurence concedes, ‘but you have
to keep him together, which is like a metaphor for life.’
With its roots in the Italian renaissance, bronze casting does not conform
to a British post-modern frame of reference and Laurence believes that bronze
casters are regarded as ‘blue collar workers in the art world’s
class system’. In the last few years, however, his achievements have
proven that personal success is possible, and that art in which man explores
his understanding of the natural world is very much part of a contemporary,
progressive way of thinking.
Over the last few years Laurence has completed a number of public and private
commissions and has seen his works go on sale through Messums Gallery of London.
He also won The Society of Portrait Sculptors’ Freakley Prize for Most
Outstanding Work in 2005.
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