LAURENCE EDWARDS A.R.B.S (B. 1967) Chord 2, 2008

LAURENCE EDWARDS A.R.B.S (B. 1967) : Chord 2, 2008


Illustration : Left to right : Cord 3, Cord 1, Cord 2

Unique bronze. Signed. Artists Collection
Height : 107 cm., 42 in.

Inspired by lightening on the marsh next to his studio and foundry in Butley, Suffolk, Cords 1, 2 & 3 were created at the same time and cast with organic material. The body is the connection, the junction between two worlds, parydigms. The grasses and reeds have been burnt out inside a mould in a kiln, bronze was then poured into the spaces that were left. An exciting process as everything can be lost during the pour, the holes and spaces, are areas where the bronze didn't get to. Leaving these elements as clues; for Laurence adds to the story of the piece, and helps to evoke other readings of the work and links to landscape.

Edwards work echo's his feelings for the Suffolk landscape. His figurative sculptures absorb forms from the landscape, fused with plant matter, and reflect the survival of an ancient culture. ' Sometimes I think that this place, this part of Suffolk, has made me. At least I am sure it has made the way I see.

Water shapes the world here, sweeping in to touch and change everything. My studio is by this water on Butley Creek, on the frontiers of the sea; a land of heath and wood, mud and marsh and tide. Every day the water floods in over the marshes, and chews at the cliffs. In the space of a morning, a vista that shimmers with water drains to slurp with mud. Water changes the pressure in the air, and in turn the thoughts in the head. I experience these changes constantly. I see the water lap up to the flood defences surrounding the studios, I know that one day it will overwhelm this place.

Some would say that this land around me is flat. For me it undulates. It has secret places, enough to sustain an inquisitive mind. It has mystery. In the distance a slight incline marks a Saxon burial ground, under this ground are 600 bodies dissolved into sand. '

Edwards knowledge and ability to be able to cast his own work is unusual and provides him with artistic opportunities that the majority of sculptors who hand over the casting process to independent foundries relinquish. Edwards was taught the lost wax, Cire Perdure method of casting bronze by Tissa Rasinghe at the Royal College of Art. He passed on the knowledge and techniques which he had learned from the infamous Angeloni Brothers, a generation of Italian casters whose knowledge of has been passed down the family line since the Italian Renaissance. Edwards went on to travel in India and Nepal working with traditional casters and discovered ' the space one can find in a process and how character can be given to an object through the personality of the caster that delivers it. Casting has now worked its way into my thought process, so that I plan to solve problems at various moments. I can allow the process to make marks and leave scars, it is like another mind.'

Edwards sculptures evolve from each other and manifest into different forms as he develops his ideas so that in a sense they are never finished, mirroring evolution. ' Sometimes I think this is because I have always been frustrated at finishing a bronze and realizing, as I complete it, that I have filed and polished the story of its making away. In my imagination this figure has always been bigger than me, so that it isn't just continuous and unfinished, but large enough to carry the weight of the many things I haven't yet worked out.