A Line in Space: William Peers

William Peers’s latest sculptures mark a dramatic change in his working process and his approach to sculpture. Smooth unbroken forms loop through space and hang in the air as if suspended by magic. Our attention is caught not only by the marble contours, but by the spaces that surround them. A conversation is taking place between matter and space. Occasionally the air seems to press into the stone and sometimes it is pushed back. Initially sculptures appear to create space, and then vice versa.

Peers’s recent work sets out to explore the movement of a line freed from the earth, travelling in space like an air current, weightless and uninhibited. He begins each piece by making a model in black wax, suspended from a simple wooden frame. This is necessary to fully explore – and comprehend – the journey of a slight volume through space. Interestingly, this approach has influenced the sculpture bases. Instead of anonymous, passive supports, the bases have become more active, simultaneously anchoring and launching the floating forms of marble that billow above them.

Peers, like sculptors before him, describes the moment when a hole is made through a marble block as a ‘revelation’. However, with this series of sculptures he has experienced a second revelation at the point when so much mass has been removed that the ghost of the original block disappears. Suddenly with all sense of the block gone, the marble limbs seem to become free and reach out. It is as though carving has become an additive process and Peers has been shaping the air more than removing marble.

Peers wrestles with symmetry - he seeks irregularity. As the sculpture progresses he makes ever smaller adjustments to the form. Changes become subtle, but imperative. His eyes circle the sculpture again and again, mending those slight inflections which arrest the flow and allow the sculpture’s energy to escape. When the last pinch of dust is scraped away and the sculpture’s energy is contained, Peers can stand back and watch the marble weave its spell and air materialise around it.

Peter Stiles