TUEMA PATTIE PAINTINGS OF ANTARCTICA

WILD LIFE SCULPTURE BY ANITA MANDL, DICK BUDDEN AND HELEN DENERLEY

EXHIBITON DATES 17 MARCH – 31^ST MARCH

PRIVATE VIEW SATURDAY 17^TH MARCH 3.30 TO 8.0 PM

Tuema Pattie’s recent voyage to the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic has inspired these remarkable paintings based on sketches and photographs taken on her journey. With the Centenary of Scott’s death and David Attenbourgh’s recent documentary, The Frozen Planet, this region has never been more topical. Tuema’s paintings capture the abundant bird and sea life, penguins, seals, whales and albatrosses; the towering ice bergs and ice formations with their strange crystalline properties reflected in the Antarctic light.

Painting in such extreme conditions posed new challenges and Tuema’s sketches had to be done in an instant before the sleet washed the paint away, her hands became numb or inquisitive penguins forced her to move on. This is why they appear so vigorous and spontaneous there was no time for second thoughts. The sketches which are included in the exhibition were worked up into the larger paintings in her Sussex studio.

Tuema Pattie describes the challenges of recording her voyage. ‘Painting was either done on board ship or ashore. On board there was some sketching on deck, but not much because of the high wind. Most sketching was done by way of the cabin porthole and although the cabin table was bolted down the items on the table were not and frequently developed a momentum of their own. The challenge was to capture the subtlety of the colours and the wide open grandeur of the sea and of Antarctica itself.

We went ashore from our ship in Zodiac inflatables and in addition to the seven layers of clothing we wore life jackets. Somehow we had to carry painting equipment and cameras and once ashore the search was on for a tussock of grass or rock on which to perch. Water colours were washed away by the sleet in an instant and Gentoo penguins pecked inquisitively at our wellies. My most vivid memories are of the silence, the grandeur and the twenty- three shades of white’.

The paintings are complimented by wild life sculpture. Animal specialist Anita Mandl has made the penguin her own, capturing it’s antics in such pieces as her humorously observed Tobogganing Penguin. Dick Budden’s semi-abstract works of a seal, sea lion and albatross in flight engage with the form of these creatures and emerge from the stone or wood in a spirit of improvised free-carving. Scottish artist, Helen Denerley, works with recycled scrap metal. In contrast to Budden’s work her penguins and sea birds, specially created for this exhibition, are based on detailed observation and drawing. On a previous trip to South Georgia Denerley created a maquette of a blue whale sculpture which if built would be 112ft long, the biggest blue whale ever landed. Made from whaling scrap, it is now in the museum in South Georgia.

A contribution from the proceeds of the exhibition will be made to the Peregrine
Foundation Albatross Fund.

EXHIBITION DATES 17TH SEPTEMBER – 15TH OCTOBER 2011

PRIVATE VIEW SATURDAY 17TH SEPTEMBER 2011

The Autumn Show celebrates the opening of the new sculpture garden, created by Sussex Garden designer, Judith Wise. Viewed in this spectacular setting in the heart of the South Downs National Park, visitors are able to experience sculpture as it should be seen in the open air, enhanced by the changing properties of the vista, the light and  the weather.

Sculptors:   Ben Barrell, Richard Bray, Dick Budden, Willow Legge, Chris Lewis, Jonathan Loxley, Anita Mandl, Nicolas Moreton, Rosie Musgrave, Mike Savage, Will Spankie, Rosie Sturgis, Lucy Unwin, Paul Vanstone, Dominic Welch and, Neil Wilkin

The sculpture celebrates a range of materials and aesthetic concerns.  The alchemic quality of stone carving which turns an inert block into a sensual, tactile object is expressed through the work of Paul Vanstone, Dominic Welch, Jonathan Loxley and Rosie Musgrave all leading sculptors whose work is gaining increasing recognition. Neil Wilkins, one of the most accomplished glass artists in the country explores the translucent qualities of glass in his superbly crafted flower and leaf constructions and Mike Savage’s organic seed and flower forms are made  from beaten and patinated copper.

Richard Bray uses the organic properties of wood to carve his sculptures which defy gravity and intrigue the eye in their sense of visual conundrum, while Lucy Unwin’s graceful dancing figures constructed from welded steel, use the tensile properties of the medium to express physical extremes in her leaping and dancing figures.

Artists: Penny Anstice, Ana Bianchi, Sarah Bowman, Lottie Cole, Catherine Forshall, Deborah Gourlay, John Hitchens,  Margaret Hunter, Tim Kent, Bridget Lansley, Andrew Roberts and  Lucy Powell.

The exhibition of painting in the gallery revels in the quality of paint.  This is a show about painting and pushing the medium to new and luscious boundaries, while interpreting the world around us.  Works from John Hitchen’s early period bring the freshness of the Sussex landscape directly to us with their bold and gestural brush strokes.  Penny Anstice’s moody sea and harbour scenes reflect her home and childhood on the west coast of Scotland. Also brought up in Scotland, Catherine Forshall’s childhood  mackerel fishing trips  have influenced  her observation of marine life which underlies her skill at pattern making and layering of the paint surface.

Sussex artist Lucy Powell’s expressive landscapes verge on abstraction in their loose interpretation of remembered places.  Berlin based artist, Margaret Hunter explores the human condition with humour, warmth and humanity.  Artist-in-Residence at the recently reopened Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey,  Deborah Gourlay’s work celebrates architectural spaces and the layering of time expressed through her moody mixed media works and Bridget Lansley’s energetic  figure studies  are created through her vibrant palette and sense of line.

EXHIBITION DATES:

2 PARK WALK, LONDON, SELECTED WORKS 1ST – 6TH NOVEMBER 2010

MONCRIEFF-BRAY GALLERY, PETWORTH, FULL EXHIBITION 9TH- 20TH NOVEMBER 2010 

New York artist, Tim Kent  returns to England with a major exhibition which revolves around his fascination with interior spaces and the people who inhabit them.  This collection of paintings ranges from the spectacular interiors of Stately homes like Chatsworth, Castle Howard, Bowhill House and Drumlanrig Castle  to intimate interiors where we feel we have been invited as voyeurs into a private world overlaid with hidden meanings and complex emotions.

New York artist, Tim Kent  returns to England with a major exhibition which revolves around his fascination with interior spaces and the people who inhabit them.  This collection of paintings ranges from the spectacular interiors of Stately homes like Chatsworth, Castle Howard, Bowhill House and Drumlanrig Castle  to intimate interiors where we feel we have been invited as voyeurs into a private world overlaid with hidden meanings and complex emotions.

The historic interiors give full-scope to Kent’s outstanding ability to absorb and manipulate grand architectural spaces and to create illusionistic and superbly painted interiors.  He has taken on such architectural giants as Vanbrough and Wyatville, yet Kent brings his own interpretation to these majestic spaces.  While the interiors appear real, often the architecture is subtly distorted as Kent exploits the tension between reality and illusion, manipulating light and perspective.  People are absent but the spirit of generations of owners is palpably present.

In his more intimate interiors the figures take on a central role, Kent describes himself as: ‘A semantic voyeur of people and a manic semiologist of things’  He is interested in the nature of people behind closed doors and the private interiors where they consume those lives. ‘I often use figures as visual cues to characterize the complex emotional states that a person experiences alone, or in relationship with another’, explains Kent.

Figures are the key protagonists in his domestic interiors, they are caught off their guard as if frozen from a play or film. ‘ When there are no figures present the focus becomes the value of objects, whether sentimental or crass, by which people surround and inevitably define themselves. I am interested in the play of signifiers. The spectator can see my paintings as frozen moments from a play or a film, looking onto little stages of time and space in which I depict the issues that continue to fascinate me as an artist, a man, a citizen, a sign’, he continued.

EXHIBITION DATES: 8TH MAY – 3RD JULY 2010

The works explore a variety of media including stone, bronze, stacked slate, beaten metal and glass.  There will be small scale works for the home and larger spectacular pieces for the garden.

Helen Denerley’s imaginative animals are beautifully crafted from discarded scrap metal.  Redundant agricultural machinery, tools and old motor bikes find a new life in her lithe and expressive creatures.  Among her biggest commissions are the 24ft giant giraffes in Edinburgh.  Helen’s work is now widely recognized resulting in world wide commissions.  She has an extraordinary skill, born from her sense of draughtmanship and observation creating these graceful creatures from the discarded flotsam of our age.

Carol Peace’s figures inhabit an inner world of self-reflection.  She derives her knowledge of the human body from detailed life drawings but the figures come from her imagination reaching beyond mere depiction.  With their delicately balanced forms and rock like plinths the large-scale works relate to forms and volumes found in the landscape, their often elongated limbs and strange proportions lending them a surreal air.

Another figurative sculptor, Janis Ridley creates figures which contain a metaphorical significance.  While very human, they also have a contemplative quality of timelessness balanced between the inner and outer world.  Influenced by Henry Moore, Giacometti and Elizabeth Frink her figures can be either calm and static or expressive of extreme movement reflecting her interest in dance.  Ridley’s major commissions include her Mother and Child sculpture, Unfolding Love in Exeter Cathedral.

South African born, Rosie Sturgis, specializes in wild life sculpture.  However, these works are not just  literally observed.   Rosie’s sense of humour and feeling for natural life  underlies her observation as she captures the humorous antics of  meerkats,  the charm of the blue footed boobies from the Galapagos Islands or the grace of a flock of avocets.

The smooth surface of Kilkenny Limestone is the preferred medium for Dominic Welch’s fluid abstract forms with their curvilinear incisions.  Welch worked for several years with the leading British sculptor Peter Randall Page who was a formative influence on his work.  Many of his carved pod and sphere forms suggest seeds or embryos with the promise of future growth.  They reflect the natural harmonies found with in nature but leave much to the imagination of the viewer.

Colin and Louise Hawkins explore the fluidity, texture and transparency of glass taking the medium to a new level in  their daring outdoor sculpture.  Using a combination of traditional and modern techniques, translucent seed pods tremble on delicate aluminium stems, coloured ferns thrust their unfurling tendrils into the air and their shimmering glass spheres adapt the translucent and reflective properties of glass in a highly innovative way.

The complex shapes and structures of organic forms, especially plants and their seeds, coupled with an interest in industrial and engineered works inform the work of Mike Savage.  A silversmith by training, Savage exploits the malleable qualities of copper and aluminium where he uses the weld lines to cut and describe the form.  The process of hammering and the conducted heat of the welding create the patina, colour and texture of the metal.

Lawrence Dicks is also fascinated by organic form in particular pods, seeds and embryos.  His pared down bronze forms, with their smooth tactile surface and subtle indentations,  hint at the life within, depicting the fragility of life and death through nature’s cycle.

Steven Kettle works in a technique of stacked slate, creating his sculptures on both a miniature and a life-size scale.  Thousands of polished slate pieces are layered one on top of the other and major commissions include portraits of R J Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire for the Science Museum and Alan Turing, World War II code breaker for Bletchley Park.

EXHIBITION DATES: 30TH APRIL -28TH JUNE 2009.

The beautiful gardens and spectacular landscape setting surrounding West Sussex’s Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, beneath the South Downs, provide an idyllic setting for this exciting sculpture exhibition.

Helen Denerley’s imaginative animals are beautifully crafted from discarded scrap metal.  Redundant agricultural machinery, tools and old motor bikes find a new life in her lithe and expressive creatures.  Some like Molly, her dog are domestic animals, others rare and endangered species, while among her biggest commissions are the 24ft giant giraffes in Edinburgh.  Helen’s work is now widely recognized resulting in world wide commissions.  She has an extraordinary skill, born from her sense of draughtmanship and observation creating these graceful creatures from the discarded flotsam of our age.

Marzia Colonna was born and studied in Italy before moving to England, which has been her home for over 30 years.  Her work is based on the human form and on humanity itself.  Her powerful bonze pieces reflect the dreams and aspirations of mankind and the profound truth about the human condition.  Her entwined figures reflect joy, love and tenderness, the winged figures step forward like mythical creatures about to take flight, a monument to our deepest aspirations.

Paul Vanstone’s new series of work includes pieces carved in a wide range of coloured stones gathered from countries as far afield as India and Italy.  His striking, classically inspired pieces use the rich veins and colours of these exotic stones to highly expressive effect.

Jilly Sutton is well known for her large wood carvings, mainly heads and figures formed from a single tree trunk.  Her portrait of the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.  Wood is a living, breathing medium and her work reflects an intimate knowledge of its properties and limitations. Her work is inspired by the tranquil setting of her home on the edge of the river Dart in Devon.  Limited edition castings taken from the original carvings are suitable for display outdoors.

This exhibition runs concurrently with: Christopher Baker, New Paintings: Land, Sky, Water Climping, West Sussex – Venice, Italy.

LAND, SKY, WATER: CLIMPING, WEST SUSSEX – VENICE, ITALY.

EXHIBITION DATES: 30TH APRIL- 16TH MAY 2009.

Christopher Baker’s latest work explores two very different venues, Climping Beach, West Sussex and Venice.   Both however, are linked by their proximity to the sea, the threat of erosion and their constantly changing weather and light.

Climping Beach, near Arundel is a fragile nature reserve of shingle, and sand dunes, a few miles from Baker’s studio.  He has walked and painted this scene for the last 20 years and it therefore seemed a natural subject to develop, exploring  the landscape in all weathers, lights and seasons, as it changes with the shifting winds and tides.

Baker is used to braving the elements, confronting nature at its most extreme.  A recent trip to Antarctica, resulted in a highly acclaimed series of paintings exhibited in Petworth House and the Royal Academy in 2006.

The small scale sketches were painted in situ working with frantic speed and energy, the brush marks bold and direct with no time for reflection.   His specially adapted painting trailer also gives Baker the freedom to work on large scale canvasses on site. On other occasions he has begun a painting indoors, only to find the need to take it out into the landscape and work directly from nature.

In travelling to Venice, Baker was confronted with a different set of challenges.  Here, he was preoccupied with the colour and light and how to set this down as rapidly as possible. Watercolour enabled him to work more rapidly than oils establishing the colours – in a series of quick, high notes – at the expense of form. The Venice paintings have a more luminous ethereal quality than the Sussex works.  While the landmarks are clearly recognizable, they are no more than indicated, it is the over riding light and atmosphere that dominate.

Baker’s solid grounding in the classical rules of painting, his understanding of compositional rules and colour harmony, give him the freedom to extend his works well beyond the realm of traditional landscape.  He has absorbed the planes and patterns of the landscape, using the device of strong diagonals to lead our eye into the distance until the land merges with the distant horizon.   He has restrained his colour to a muted palette which resonates with subtle accents.  While the paint surface may appear spontaneous and gestural, it is complex, with layer upon layer of brush strokes and glazes

The Sussex paintings should be seen as a series but not a linear progression; they inform each other in a complex interconnecting web of themes and harmonies. They move from the warm tones and luminous tranquility of East Path, captured on a hazy summer’s day, to the other side of Baker’s ego where in paintings like Blue or Blue Storm, the darker side of his poetic imagination takes over and he depicts nature’s elemental wilderness.

While these paintings rely on a rigorous intellectual process they are at the same time an expression of Baker’s deep love for the landscape.  They become a conduit for his emotional response to nature.  Like the great romantic painters of the nineteenth century they convey a sense of the sublime, a feeling of awe in the presence of nature’s overwhelming grandeur.  They enervate us and lift our spirits.  From the every day Baker distils a sense of poetry, drama and a belief in a dimension beyond our normal experience.

Baker is a leading landscape painter who has exhibited at Pallant House, Chichester, Petworth House the Royal Academy as well as internationally.   He has won awards and scholarships and is a tutor at West Dean College in Sussex.

This exhibition runs concurrently with: Summer Sculpture 2009: Paul Vanstone, Marzia Colonna, Anthony Turner, Dominic Welch, Helen Denerley, Jilly Sutton and Rosie Sturgis.

EXHIBITION DATES: 27TH SEPTEMBER – 12TH OCTOBER 2008

This exhibition brings together sculpture and drawings spanning fifty years from work made by Willow when she had just graduated from Chelsea Art School to recent pieces made especially for this show.  These sculptures have lain quietly in her home, hidden from public gaze and this long overdue exhibition pays tribute to her exceptional talent.

Willow’s professional career has been that of a successful portrait sculptor, to start with concentrating mainly on family while her children were growing up.  Later her interests expanded to art therapy and this she practiced for ten years in a psychiatric hospital.  Following this, there were many years using her portrait skills at the Tussauds studio creating likenesses of some of the leading celebrities of the day.

Parallel with her portraits however, Willow created a very personal group of works.  In contradiction to her professional persona, these concentrated on the inner, essential, character of a subject, the life that is inside rather than the outward appearance.  Her interests in the writings of Carl Jung, her work as a therapist and a tendency to introspection have all influenced these highly individual pieces.  Made purely for herself they have an exceptional beauty and integrity and have never been exhibited before.

Willow’s work has links with many main stream artists such as Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù and Elizabeth Frink, while in her carving she aspires to the simplicity of the Inuit sculptors and to certain early works of Moore and Hepworth.  However she describes her work as ‘intuitive’, only when she has finished a piece does she understands its true significance.  Much of her work is autobiographical, reflecting her preoccupations and concerns at the time.

Looking through her sketch books while assembling this show Willow commented, ‘it’s almost like reading a diary, I can travel back as far as the 1960s: remembering, the children, my friends, our holidays, even walks we went on and the different shapes of the landscape’.

There is no dramatic evolution to the work, but common threads unite the pieces across the years.  Willow’s fascination with babies is evident, their shapes, movements, positions and proportions.    Other works are directly autobiographical, the haunting Hangdog represented her despair and depression at the death of her second son, this was followed by the sprightly, animated Greyhound, the two animals representing the different facets of her character.

EXHIBITION DATES: 7TH -21ST JUNE 2008

Artist Pippa Blake and photographer Kos Evans use their individual mediums to create work transcending their traditional boundaries. This exhibition celebrates their lifelong fascination with the sea and is the result of several months’ collaboration. The work captures a sense of escapism associated with sea voyages, the sense of infinity and the ever present horizon.

“This project is a radical departure from my sports photography” says Kos. “I am known for taking pictures 200ft up the mast of an ocean racer, hanging out of a helicopter or tethered to a racing mark underwater, but I wanted to take photographs that could have been painted, creating an ambiguous image open to many interpretations’.

Like Kos, Pippa Blake has spent all her life associated with the sea. She has sailed the world’s oceans and circumnavigated the globe. “My studio faces Chichester harbour:  the sea, sky and sunsets are part of my daily life. I have always been fascinated by the horizon and the sense of what lies beyond.”

Pippa’s work conveys a sense of the unknown and although based on memory and observation, the paintings refer to a universal sea as a metaphor for life. Last year she spent three weeks on a research ship between Newfoundland and Iceland and the sea and weather conditions she captured in sketches and photographs are incorporated in these paintings.

Kos Evans first met artist Pippa Blake in 1981, when Pippa’s husband, the late Sir Peter Blake was competing in the Whitbread Round the World Race. Since then their paths have crossed the globe at many events. Both artists have found the experience of working together hugely liberating.  Pippa has used images shot by Kos as a departure for some of her paintings.  She has also developed a technique of layering transparent film over her sketches and applying further layers of paint.  In collaborative works, Pippa has painted over the surface of photographs shot by Kos while other pieces combine elements of painting and photography in a collage technique.

EXHIBITION DATES: 4TH MAY -26TH MAY 2008

This landmark exhibition by John Hitchens is the first to give an overview of his work.  It falls into two parts, work from the late 80s when he was still depicting landscape with a naturalistic palette and strong figurative content and recent work where he uses a controlled palette of earth coloured pigments, paring the landscape down to a more rigorous, formal pattern.

Linking the two periods are the sand paintings where the artist poured liquid paint onto wet-running sand photographing the random effects, which look like images of earth from space.

The show is unique in presenting work created over a 30-year period, never before exhibited thus explaining the evolution of the artist’s current painting style.

The son of artist, Ivon Hitchens, John grew up at Graffham, West Sussex in a wooded, landscape nestling below the South Downs.  While he has painted much further afield, the West Sussex countryside, where he still lives, has provided him with inspiration for much of his life.   The gallery is a renovated Sussex barn, located in an idyllic landscape just a few miles from where Hitchens created this work creating a wonderfully atmospheric setting for the show.

The early paintings in the exhibition represent a summation of his first style.  They are large in scale (some measuring as much as 2 metes long) and have never been exhibited before.  After painting the land beneath the open sky and the changing light and weather conditions, Hitchens realized that the sky, for so long the starting point for the mood of a painting, had in fact become a limitation.  He was searching for the compositional freedom to express the formation of the land and a vigorous, gestural means of expression.  These paintings see him flattening the perspective to eliminate the sky and horizon, and entering deep into the woodland analyzing the shapes and patterns of trees, clearings, light and shade.

From this last period of gestural evocation his style evolved to incorporate a much stronger feeling of form in complex compositions of flat, articulate colour.  The rectangular boundaries of the paint surface were abandoned as he made a series of work based on circles, inspired by ancient stone circles – later opening up to include pathways crossing the ritual circle.

Hitchens’s latest work refers back to the circle and line, the basis of most of creation but incorporates a myriad of references gleaned from years of studying the landscape.  The circles of growth rings observed in trees and throughout nature, the lines of strata and sediment, contour lines of hills and fields, the cross connectedness of organisms; from large scale to microscopic also, the organic surface of the landscape, seen from an aerial perspective such as the bands of pointillist stubble, dark tones of plough lines and dots of fencing.

This exhibition runs concurrently with The Summer Sculpture Show: New Work by Richard Aumonier, Leonie Gibbs  Jonathan Loxley, Gilly Sutton and Paul Vanstone  for which a separate press release  is available.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM – SCULPTURES FOR INTERIORS

EXHIBITION DATES 7TH – 20TH OCTOBER 2007

David Backhouse, Anita Mandl and Nicola Toms each highlight a different aspect of the animal kingdom from domestic animals who have given their lives in the service of man, through commonly known and loved wild animals to the untamed beasts of the African bush.  Bringing these works together highlights man’s often ambiguous relationship with animals.   In these sculptures the animals are celebrated and revered while many of the species depicted are under threat as they are hunted or their natural habitat destroyed.  The works are reasonably small in scale following the tradition of European animalier sculpture – precious works of art that can be displayed in an intimate domestic setting.

David Backhouse grew up in Wiltshire and was surrounded by domestic animals from an early age.  He is particularly interested in the relationship between man and animals and is best known for his large scale  Animals in War Memorial located on London’s, Park Lane which celebrates the enormous contributions made by animals during the conflicts of the 20^th century.   The gallery is extremely fortunate to be offering several maquettes for the memorial, a  gunnery mule, dogs and horses which are not only outstanding works of art but have a historic significance.

His work celebrates the dignity and loyalty of domestic animals and in many ways is a comment on both the human and animal condition.  He has long been fascinated by the half-human, half-animal figures of Egyptian mythology as well as the integration of animals and humans found in the Elgin Marbles. David commented, ‘My sculptures are reflections on the human and animal condition in the modern world reflecting loss and tragedy, hope and delight and above all tenacity of spirit’.

Backhouse is one of Britain’s best known and most outstanding figurative sculptors whose other public commissions include The Dolphin Family for London’s Docklands, Pilgrim for the Bishop’s Palace Garden, Wells, and Cloaked Horseman for St.Bartholomew’s, Bristol City Centre.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of British sculptors, has exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol and held numerous exhibitions in London, the regions, Europe and the USA.

Anita Mandl is a trained zoologist who joined the staff of the Medical School, University  of Birmingham. While working in animal research, she undertook evening classes in sculpture at Birmingham College of Art, before moving to Devon and becoming a full-time sculptor in 1965.  Animals were her natural choice of subject and her interest lies in depicting them in a pared down simplified form. Brancusi has been the biggest influence on her work.  The pieces are reduced to semi- abstract form but retain a marvellous sense of characterisation.  There is often an underlying sense of humour in the choice of animals – her baboons and guerrillas can have an uncanny resemblance to humans.

Mandl  is a carver, working in alabaster, soap stone and marble.  The animal is dictated by the shape of the piece of stone.  The challenge lies in carving the piece and how it will emerge from the rough stone.  Her natural preference is for animals which give themselves to smooth rounded forms such as otters, penguins and bears.   They are contented well-fed creatures who examine us inquisitively but serenely. Her pieces are cast as bronzes from the original carvings at the famous  Pangolin foundry near Gloucester.  The artist has shown widely in London and the regions, including the Royal Academy, London, and the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

The third sculptor, Nicola Toms, grew up on a cattle ranch in Zimbabwe where her nearest neighbours lived ten miles away.  She spent her childhood surrounded by both game and cattle and was constantly at her father’s side as he drove around the family ranch.

Toms studied graphic art in Harare and then moved permanently to London in 1993.  The biggest influence on her work are the French animalier sculptors and in particular Rembrandt Bugatti.   In her work she aims to create convincing form through her understanding of anatomy and at the same time portray the subtle characterisation of the animals through her sensitive observation of detail.

Some of her work also has an underlying sense of humour, ‘A trotting sow’s undulating folds of flesh jostling in tandem; baby elephants fearless and playfully imitating mock charges.  That youthful desire to play and experiment reminds me of how closely linked we all are on this small planet’ explained Toms.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions in London and the Provinces and undertaken many private commissions.  Works on view to the public include a life-size Bull at Cranborne Manor, in Dorset, and crocodiles perched on lanterns outside Home House, a private members club on Portman Square, in London’s West End

The Animal Kingdom exhibition is running at the gallery in conjunction with Camera to Camera: Historic Domestic Interiors.  An Exhibition by New York Artist, Tim Kent.   These superbly realized   sculptures complement the precious and intimate atmosphere of Kent’s interiors.