ORANGE.- Laurence Edwards announced a large exhibition of bronze sculpture opening at the Orange Regional Gallery in New South Wales, Australia. A Gathering of Uncertainties runs from 4th February to 16th April 2023, and is the biggest exhibition of the leading British sculptor’s work to date.
The show may come as a surprise to those who associate Edwards with his native East Anglia, and marks a turning point in an international career which is picking up speed.
Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 2012, and represented by Messums Wiltshire who originated this touring exhibition, Edwards’ works seem to germinate in the reed beds and estuarine mud of coastal Suffolk. Often permeated with crushed sticks, leaves, seeds, grit and rope, or including fragments of the armatures used for casting, in Edwards’ hands the intensely figurative undergoes a metamorphosis.
Edwards is in his element amid Holocene flint deposits and ancient Saxon geology. Ship burials and sand bodies, where the acidity has destroyed bone structure and lacunae are packed with stained sand, echo his studio process of lost wax casting. “Flints are created in a process very similar to casting,” Edwards says, cheerilylobbing a trapezium-shaped flint onto his studio table.
You could say the sculptor has been on something of a journey of personal archaeology. Embedded in the far east of England, few would place him on the baking plains of New South Wales. Yet, inexorably making its way across the seas, is a shipping container expertly packed with 24 individual bronzes; seven over 8ft tall, a large group of life-sized figures, a giant head, some bronze maquettes and several plinth pieces.
Edwards has got form in springing surprises. In 2008 he built a sturdy raft and, loading it with three titanic bronze Creek Men, towed them up the estuary from Aldeburgh to moor midstream and distinctly uninvited, alongside Snape Maltings. There the classical music festival founded by Benjamin Britten in 1948 was in full flow. “I think of that day as the day that I was born,” says Edwards with a smile. Crowds gathered, a TV crew arrived and by nightfall the startled Snape Maltings management had called to offer their heartfelt congratulations. Wider recognition followed and since that day Edwards continues to generate excitement and sometimes, controversy.
In November 2021 he installed the monumental 26-ft bronze Yoxman, a totem for a vast landscape restoration project, alongside a bow in the A12 highway. Towering over the parkland with battered vulnerability, the emphatically gendered male figure drew predictable responses from the British tabloid press and a lot of questions from local residents. What does it mean? Why is it here?
Most sculptors working in bronze have their work cast in commercial foundries, but Edwards learned early to do his own casting – using a combination of medieval Indian and contemporary techniques.
Once he’d closed the doors on an impractical London studio, and found the space and freedom he needed to establish his rural foundry, it became clear that you cannot pour bronze on your own. So, Edwards gathered a community of sculptors and artists to work alongside him, which eventually became Butley Mills Studios. Perhaps because of this collaborative imperative, Edwards’ manner is convivial and voluble, though the haunting faces of his bronze men hint at a solitary and unreachable inner landscape.
Now on the eve of 2023, Edwards is in the middle of a highly creative period. In 2020 he installed Doncaster Heads: A Rich Seam - 40 bronze portraits sculpted from life, set in 20 tonnes of bedrock in the town centre. That same year his 8ft Man of Stones was installed at the distinguished Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park in Norwich. At Remains To Be Seen,his May 2022exhibition at Snape Maltings with the painter Paul Benney and New York artist Kiki Smith, the gravitas of Edwards’ works such as Heft and Tribe, made an impression at the tail-end of a devastating pandemic.
On his first visit to Australia in 2015, Edwards was excited to find an awe-inspiring archaeological record, and the longest continual human occupation spanning nearly 70,000 years of indigenous culture. In Australia he says, his work looks different. “My figures are cast in metal but ideas can affect them. It’s as if the bronze becomes porous,” he says. “Perhaps the way that people perceive them is more powerful than the metal itself.”
The city of Orange, rich in gold mining history, is a 3.5-hour drive from Sydney. The Gallery’s origins go back to the 1960s with the establishment of the Orange Festival of Arts, and the museum has recently reopened after an extensive expansion, complete with state-of-the-art galleries and facilities.
Edwards cites Tilman Riemenschneider of the late German Middle Ages and Germaine Richier working in Paris in the early C20th as fellow travellers, and is honoured to be picking up the threads of the figurative sculpture tradition in Australia.
And, catching the threads of widespread émigré experience, the bronze men currently sailing towards Botany Bay are stateless. “They’re due to go on to other museums after this,” Edwards says. “They’ve become nomadic, embarked on a journey that may never end.”
