Worthing Museum has an interesting sculpture exhibition on until January 2012, featuring the Latvian-born Dora Gordin (1895-1991) – she later changed this to Gordine – who settled in London after studying music and art in Paris. It is co-curated with Dorich House, where the artist lived and where the Gordine archive continues to reside in […]
Tag: ‘Alan Thornhill’
On the tradition of pre-conceiving sculpture
This short clip is part of a Documentary film by Anna Thornhill. It features archive footage of sculptor Alan Thornhill working on a sculpture in Putney in 1989 and the resulting work, Exodus, some 20 years later at Kingscote Park in Gloucestershire. Thornhill’s self-devised method of improvisation using clay allowed him to abandon the use of the sculpture […]
Leonora Carrington on intellectualising art
It is sad to hear Leonora Carrington has died aged 94. Her recent sculpture (in the link, seen here in the exhibition which she lived long enough to see open), is seemingly interpreted from the imagery of her earlier paintings. For me, it does not have the power of her two-dimensional work or earliest sculpture. Nevertheless, for […]
Large Clay Sculpture: Improvisation course at West Dean
4 day course at West Dean College, West Sussex led by Jon Edgar – abandoning the use of the armature as stifling to creativity, students construct random clay elements (left) and then free-build with them… turning the clay matrix and continuing to add until forms start to emerge. This technique was devised by veteran sculptor Alan […]
Alan Thornhill – Thoughts on the Aesthetic Experience and On Creativity (2008)
Techniques The most important techniques are those devised by the individual for dealing with self consciousness, dominant intentionality, insidious predisposition toward the familiar and the nameable, fear of failure, dependence on achieving acceptable results, all of which undermine and debilitate the process. Originality Originality consists in authenticity; is work which originates from inside the maker, […]
New film – Spirit in Mass: Alan Thornhill
SPIRIT IN MASS: Journey into Sculpture is a 40 minute documentary which charts Alan Thornhill’s unconventional journey into sculpture. Discovering himself to be by nature an improviser yet committed to the time-honoured language and sensuous values of sculpture, he devised a way of working which embraced spontaneity and the unforeseen. This approach has inspired sculpture students […]