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William Peers
Carving in Marble -
Included in the exhibition (and exhibited inside) are four recently completed carvings that show the artist at his most exuberant, pushing his chosen material to its limits. Peter Stiles describes how the stone now “billows and bends as if a wind has blown onto them altering their shapes”. These new works continue Peers’s central theme of engineering his carvings so they appear to yield to the force of nature, their permanence and weight transformed into something far lighter, almost ephemeral, as if the stone had come alive.
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William Peers studied at Falmouth Art College after which he was apprenticed to a stone-carver, Michael Black, who urged him to work slowly and entirely by hand. Peers worked in the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, and later spent time in Corsica where he found a tranquil retreat to work and develop his ideas. His earliest carvings were figurative and followed the long history of English stone carving brought to prominence by Henry Moore and Eric Gill. In the 1990s Peers moved to north Cornwall and there followed a period of fifteen years carving relief sculptures in Hornton Stone which slowly moved towards abstraction.In 2007, with the Hornton Stone quarry nearly exhausted, he began working in Portuguese and Italian marble, a material which had a dramatic effect on the style of his work. In 2010 he embarked on a series of sculptures entitled ‘100 Days: Sketched in Marble’ in which he carved a marble sculpture each day for one hundred days. Working repeatedly within a time limit led him to a bolder approach to carving and allowed him the freedom to create more dynamic forms whilst further understanding the possibilities of this new material.The switch to marble also allowed Peers to develop his technical skills and embark on ambitious carvings on a much larger scale than before. Two of these monumental sculptures, designed for the landscape are shown in this exhibition. The first and largest is ‘Ley’, hand-carved from a six-ton block of marble over the course of four years, convex and concave shapes perfectly mirroring each other and giving the whole block a light, sinuous quality. The second, ‘Ortolo’, was completed in 2016, and appears as a simple loop of marble, curving gently over the contours of a landscape and focussing the eye through the stone to the view beyond. In these outdoor works Peers brilliantly anticipates how the evening or dawn light will add a further dimension to these simple forms, using the natural translucency of marble to provide a dramatic halo of reflected sunlight around its edges. The interaction of his sculpture with their surroundings is a vital part of the artist’s approach to his work: landscape and the environment drawn into the sculpture, becoming an intrinsic part of the experience.
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William Peers: Carving in Marble
Past viewing_room
