Laurence Edwards
Joshua Monaghan
A mile or so inland from the south Suffolk coast, where oystercatchers swoop over the bulrushes of Butley Creek, a life-sized human form is alternately revealed and concealed by the tide, while slowly sinking into the silt. As if to counter the coming loss, next to the A12 is the 26-foot-tall Yoxman, a figure that seems to have risen out of the ground from aeons past, its gigantic bronze body clustered with the cuts and burrs of the struggle. And then there is the altarpiece at the church of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, cast from mud, wood and hogweed. While its arms are outstretched in the classic Christ-on-the-Cross position, the figure resembles ‘something that’s crept in from the marshes’, according to the creator of all these pieces, Laurence Edwards.
Joshua Monaghan
Laurence’s art is tied to this patch of Suffolk, where his family has lived for generations, and which, he says, ‘is imbued with myth and magic, Sutton Hoo and Saxon history’. His art is also informed by a fascination with material. Anthony Caro was a visiting professor at Canterbury College of Art, where Laurence was a student, and inspired his pivot from painting to steel sculpture. ‘I was seduced by the process and the foundry,’ he explains. There was further training at the Royal College of Art and then in India: ‘I learned there what I could use from the land – termite sand, rice husks – and about discipline. If you’re casting a god, the metal isn’t allowed to break pour, because that’s the deity’s lifeblood.’
Laurence’s main studio is in a mid-20th-century former fire station
Joshua Monaghan
Today, Laurence is one of the few artists in this country to cast his own work and his foundry is staffed by a team of eight. He has a studio at the foundry, where ‘anything over 8 feet is made – it’s to do with the size of the truck I can hire to transport work’. But his main studio is 10 miles south, in a mid-20th-century former fire station, where he works alone and where, on the day of our visit, he was preparing for a solo show at Messums West in Wiltshire.
Joshua Monaghan
Mirrors line a wall in the main room (‘I couldn’t afford a model when I started, so I used myself – and still do’). Other rooms are papered with experimental paintings and collages that feature his sculptures at different angles and configurations, in woods and on the open marshland. Laurence mentions the concept of the symbolic axis mundi, which connects the heavens with
the earth. Here, in this land he loves, his art does just that.
‘Laurence Edwards: Sculpture Part II’ is at Messums West, Tisbury, Wiltshire, July 26-September 29: messums.org