ARK is a world class contemporary sculpture exhibition which will take place at Chester Cathedral between 7 July – 15 October 2017. It will be the largest modern sculpture exhibition to be held in the north west of England and will feature 90, three dimensional works by over 50 internationally renowned sculptors including Damien Hirst, Sir Antony Gormley, Lynn Chadwick, Barbara Hepworth, Sarah Lucas, David Mach, Kenneth Armitage and Peter Randall-Page, amongst others.
The exhibition will use the magnificent interior of the cathedral as a backdrop to extraordinary works of art as well as the beautiful and ancient spaces surrounding it. Several sculptors will be showing brand new works of art whilst some pieces will emerge for public view from private collections. It will be the first time these pieces have been seen together.
The Ingram Collection is loaning two works – Elisabeth Frink’s Eagle (Lectern) and Bernard Meadow’s Cock (Fountain Figure).
Eagle Lectern, 1962
Some of the most important post-war artistic projects were Church commissions, such as those for Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by bombing in 1940. Basil Spence, the architect of the new Cathedral at Coventry, commissioned the young sculptor Elisabeth Frink to produce a lectern. This was her first major commission and she created Eagle (Lectern) in 1962.
While she was studying at Chelsea College of Art, Frink had been a student of Bernard Meadows, and she shared with him a pre-occupation with the human condition and an interest in the possibilities of sculpting animals. One of her earliest works, Bird 1951, was purchased by the Tate and she continued to sculpt and paint images of birds for decades. Frink’s lectern evolved out of her previous bird works, and also studies she made of the birds at London Zoo. To create the feathers, she set kindling sticks into the plaster. Of this sculpture, Basil Spence wrote that Frink… “has designed and carried out a magnificent bird which looks as if it has just settled there after a long flight”.
Cock (Fountain Figure), 1959
Bernard Meadows, alongside artists such as Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler, was one of the outstanding generation of post-war British sculptors who took centre stage at the 1952 Venice Biennale. Meadows exhibited three bronze works in the British Pavilion in Venice – two crabs and a cock. These works – spiky and violent – were described by the art critic Herbert Read as part of ‘The Geometry of Fear’ – a phrase which came to be associated with their sculptures.
As well as the crab, Meadows’ work of the 1950s was primarily focused on birds, in particular the cockerel. The artist commented ‘birds can express a whole range of tragic emotion, they have a vulnerability which makes it easy to use them as vehicles for people’.
In 1954 Meadows had been commissioned to create a new sculpture for a school by the Hertfordshire Director of Education. The result was a startling, double life size sculpture of a cockerel, more naturalistic in style than the present work. The success of this venture led Meadows to continue to investigate sculpting animals as vehicles for the human figure. Meadows said that his work was ‘all about the human condition. The crabs, and the birds, and the armed figures, the pointing figures, are all about fear … perhaps not fear, it’s vulnerability’.
Cock (Fountain Figure) is unique and was commissioned by Crown Woods School, Eltham in 1959, for the fountain in their grounds. For many years it was thought to have been destroyed, until it re-surfaced at auction and was purchased by The Ingram Collection.
ARK at Chester Cathedral
Free entry | 7 July – 15 October 2017
https://chestercathedral.com/visit-us/ark/