CHICHESTER.- This summer Pallant House Gallery presents an installation of bronze sculptures by British sculptor Laura Ford (b.1961), featuring the uncanny imagined creatures for which she is recognised. Using Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast as a starting point, the installation creates a link with the Gallery’s major exhibition on Christopher Wood, to whom Jean Cocteau was a close friend and influence. This is the latest in a series of outdoor sculpture exhibitions in the Gallery’s courtyard garden, designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole, and comes as Ford establishes a new studio in West Sussex. A related indoor display of Ford’s drawings and smaller ceramics runs in the Garden Gallery until October 2016.

Born in Cardiff in 1961, Ford studied at the Bath Academy of Art and the Chelsea College of Art. She is known for the playful quality of her work in which she creates characters that have a dark edge and blur the boundaries between animal and human expression: girls that turn into espaliered trees, animals and birds displaying human frailties and characteristics. Through these imagined and sometimes nightmarish creatures she comments on the human condition, as well as social and political issues, drawing on the influence of folk and ‘remembered and mis-remembered’ fairytales. The use of creatures in her work is also intended to make the works more approachable, making sometimes uncomfortable feelings more palatable and engaging.

The bronze works on display include Espaliered Girl (2007), Lion (2014) and Behemoth (2016), the latter based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s book Master and Margareta and on classical statues of Hercules. The choice of works has been influenced by Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast. Ford explains: ‘as soon as you step into the beast’s grounds everything comes alive and appears to be conscious. I thought it would be good to have sculptures that were of things you would expect to find in courtyards - the classical sculpture, the espaliered tree, the sculpture of a bird or lion - but to try to fill them with a consciousness and life.’

An accompanying display in the Garden Gallery comprises a series of small ceramic sculptures and drawings that will link the exterior and interior spaces, which are both ‘living’ spaces that function as a place to eat, drink and socialise in the Pallant Café and Restaurant. Ford enjoys ‘the difference in the way audiences interact with work when they are just sitting around having lunch or a coffee with it. There is less pressure and more of an opportunity to catch something out of the corner of your eye and to let the subconscious do its work.’

Previous outdoor sculpture exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery have included the carved stone heads by Emily Young in 2014, and the terracotta and ceramic figures by Indian Outsider artist Nek Chand in 2015.