Acrobat, stone
With Child, stone
David England
David painted since he was very young with, as he says, “a seriousness that went beyond a hobby”. He held his first exhibitions in Liverpool in the 1970s. In 1988 he moved to Ludlow in Shropshire where his work was shown regularly at the Silk Top Hat Gallery, as well as at the Gateway in Shrewsbury. In 1993, he won second prize in the exhibition/competition Inspired by Gilbert White at the Tabernacle Gallery in Machynlleth (now known as MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, Wales). The same year, he held a major exhibition there, Messengers, an installation consisting of 3,000 lengths of bamboo with stone icons plus 60 other pieces including sculptures, drawings and paintings. He has exhibited and sold his sculpture widely since then. He lives and works at Much Birch in Herefordshire, and teaches stone carving at the Rudolph Steiner School in Much Dewchurch
Most of my work, whether two- or three-dimensional, starts out as a pencil drawing. I'll begin with a flowing, explorative sketch around the idea I have for a piece and then fine-tune the design down to a definitive layout. I really got into sculpture after the installation I made in Machynlleth in 1993. I visited a monumental mason's yard in Hereford and came home with a bit of Bath stone that had been reclaimed from an old church window and had a go at carving something from the soft stone. That was pretty much it – I was hooked, and sculpture has been my principal interest ever since.
Talk to most artists and they'll say they love the tactile joy of working with materials, no matter what heady doctrine they wish to convey through their imagery. Saying that, the initial moment of the idea for a piece is what gives me the biggest thrill. There is the diamond light of human imagining and what makes an artist what he or she is.
David England, 2005