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‘Andy’s relationship with his work is both passionate and profound. His approach to the work offers a conduit which puts him in direct connection with the source power creator. As wild a claim as this sounds in words, in practice this is a reality. All of the four elements are utilised when creating his work – Earth, Air Fire and Water. Add to this mix the physical material of the bronze and stainless steel, and magic happens !!His artworks are not implied, not an impression of, you are witnessing the smoking barrel of the event.Each piece is a testament of the physical creation of positive energy.’

“Look at my artworks with fresh eyes as pure energy, and will see it for what it truly is.”

Andy Hopper is a British born Sculptor and Master Blacksmith who specialises in hot-forging & forming of high-grade bronze and stainless steel. Creating beautiful artworks which can be enjoyed in the home as a statement piece, or equally suited in a more natural environment outside.

Born in 1973 in London, Andy now lives and works in Dorset England, where his purpose built studio is located.

He has won numerous awards and received international acclaim for his work. Most notably the highly prestigious Tonypandy Cup, awarded by The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths in 2014, whom also awarded him Fellowship in 2017.

He has held Master-class forging demonstrations and lectures in bronze forging both in England and at the Memphis Metal Museum, USA.

From a very early age Andy was keenly observant of line and proportion. This concern and fascination of form metamorphosed across a variety of mediums before finally being expressed solely in metal.

As well as having an enduring passion for photography, he was a keen fine artist during his teenage years being very influenced in particular by the work of Francis Bacon and Henry Moore. He expressed this through his oil paintings and sculptures. These mediums allowed some intense works during this period.

Analytical by nature, Andy is passionately fuelled and deeply inspired the elemental forces of physics and mathematics, which is arguably the language of the Gods. It is the study of the behaviour of those forces in our Universe which Andy finds truly engaging.

Now, as an accomplished Master Blacksmith, he combines and harnesses the almighty energies of extreme heat and explosive force, coupled with complete freedom of process to manipulate the materials of bronze and stainless steel in a fluid and controlled way.

A wonderful and skilful use of mathematics, hot physics, and an emotional relationship with the artwork being created.

After completing a DipAD in Sculpture 1970.  Andy made his first visit to Carrara in Tuscany. During the 1970s Andy spent many months there carving the marble. Andy’s work can be found in private collections.  In Milan the Museu Pagani. In Tokyo the Art Planning Studio and Fuji Television and in Denver USA to name a few. Andy shows very rarely as showing is not his priority.  He does, however, like to sell his work to a willing buyer.

Currently Andy produces small bronzes in his foundry in Leyton and continues to carve marble at his studio in Normandy.

It is difficult to sum up Andy’s influence on sculpture of the last 30 years.  Suffice to say that during the eighties his foundry produced all the well known bronzes of the time. He continues to encourage younger artists to learn skills and to share in some of his.  

Find out more at http://andyeltonsculptor.com. 

Ama Menec’s work often covers themes of loss and recovery whether species or Gods, celebrating our man made or naturally recovered populations of Buzzards and Red Kites, the loss of up to 100 species via the Badger Trophic Cascade, or the reclamation of Ancient Gods repurposed to fit our modern times.

Knowing a male God hovering over me would not induce sleep, she has feminised Hypnos to hang over my bed as Hypnia the Goddess of Sleep. Based on a bronze in the British Museum, who had lost a wing in antiquity, hers enfolds the face, a feathery cloak of slumber. 

For more information, visit www.amamenec-sculpture.co.uk and www.facebook.com/Ama-Menec-Sculpture. 

Inspired by the monumental building methods of the industrial age, Alex Devereux employs the shapes and forms that were prevalent in the 19th century, mimicking an industrial style and creating a historical aesthetic within contemporary art. His new series of works titled  ‘Daedalus’ after the mythological Greek inventor and father of Icarus, challenges the concepts of speed, modernity and future by adopting the pioneering attitude of an inventor or entrepreneur.

Using new materials, technology and patination to realise the work, he creates theatrical facsimiles of the past, giving his sculptures a context rooted in the historical, exciting the imagination of what they could have been or why they are there.

Each ‘Daedalus’ individually titled ‘Fire Fly’ after the first class of locomotive on the Great Western Railway followed by the individual locomotive name (eg: Fire Fly Hector), are reminiscent of 1930’s lamps that implied speed whilst being functionally static. However, by losing their functionality they become a transient keyhole looking into a playful idea of the future. Stories are perpetuated by relics of another time that now serve to  entice the imagination. These relics are harbingers of potential futures.

Find out more at www.alexanderdevereux.com.

Kendra Haste is a renowned contemporary animal sculptor working with the medium of galvanised wire.

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1998, Kendra has established a significant reputation in her field with work included in collections world-wide. She is an elected member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, the Society of Wildlife Artists (UK) and a signature member of the Society of Animal Artists (USA).

Public sculptures in the United Kingdom include an elephant at Waterloo Station, London, thirteen works (lions, polar bear, elephant and baboons) at the Tower of London, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces in 2010 and a rhinoceros at Cannon Hall Museum, Barnsley. Her work is also in the collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming.

“What interests me most about studying animals is identifying the spirit and character of the individual creatures. I try to create a sense of the living, breathing subject in a static 3-D form, attempting to convey the emotional essence without indulging in the sentimental or anthropomorphic.”

Kendra has one piece exhibited at the Cotswold Sculpture Park this year:
North American Brown Bear (Grizzly)
Executed in 2015. 
Steel armature and painted galvanised wire.
54(h) x 84(w) x 44(d) in | 138(h) x 214(w) x 112(d) cm

Kendra’s subject matter concentrates solely on life-sized wildlife and she is available to commission.

For more information, visit Kendra’s webpage, at https://www.patrickdaviesca.com/artists/kendra-haste-mrss/3/overview/ . You can also find her on Facebook, Instagram and Wikipedia.

Beth works intuitively and unconsciously, often on multiple pieces at once, from forged iron or clay sculptures, to collage, photography, printing and drawing. Whatever she is making, the spirit in which she works is always the same: to find and describe the strange, wild and connective elements all around us. She says “I draw on many things for inspiration – personal symbols, the collective consciousness, and the things I see, hear and feel every day.”

John Jebb is a sculptor based in Ashton Keynes, near Cirencester, UK.

At age twelve, and as a result of his father’s death, John attended Wellington College in Berkshire, where he spent many hours in the art department fulfilling a burgeoning passion for visual art.  After leaving, he attended the Central School of Art, London, followed by a brief attendance at Birmingham School of Art.

John says “I found myself floundering without direction or learning any skills in Art Schools that had discarded traditional training in the arts upheavals of the sixties.  I walked out and taught myself to carve stone.”

In 1972 John went to California. After a couple of rewarding years in Porterville, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Video at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

After completing his MFA, he was offered a job at the Long Beach Museum of Art.  His work, as well as running the video facility, included successfully raising funds through the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council to provide expansion of the Video Art Program and its archive (now incorporated into the Getty Museum Collection in LA).

John left Long Beach and set up a large studio in LA with his friend the sculptor Masayuki Oda.  This provided him the ideal situation to make more sculpture.  He had his first Solo Exhibition in Los Angeles, 1984, and as a result of some sales he decided to  “go to Cararra, Italy, and buy tons of marble!”

Throughout the next thirty years he created work in his studio, taught Art in some Colleges and Universities in California and occasionally worked with mannequin companies in LA and Hollywood special effects television and film productions. He regularly exhibited in solo and group shows in California and across the USA and also accepted private commissions.

In 1997 he set up a studio in Portland, Dorset – and worked bi-continentally for a decade. This led to a permanent move back to the UK, in 2008.

John says, “I have now come full circle back to my roots in England.”

For more information, and to see examples of John’s work, visit his website, at www.johnjebb.com.

Ruth Brenner is a Scottish sculptor and installation artist living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne. After graduating from Newcastle University in 2012 as a Master of Fine Art, she won a Royal British Society of Sculptors bursary award in 2013. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD researching corporeality and the bodily, both physical and mental, acts of making. 

This year, Ruth has one piece at the Cotswold Sculpture Park: Condenser, 2010 (sheet steel, 113 x 140 x 132 cm).

Condenser is a work constructed from sheet steel and has the appearance of discarded industrial equipment. Ruth says “I am interested in industrial archaeology and highlighting the much-overlooked beauty of our industrial heritage.  This piece of work was made in 2010 and has been exhibited in its polished state.  However, it now shows the rich patina of oxidisation, marking the passage of time.“

Below you will find a couple of images of some of Ruth’s recent work. Find out more at her website, www.ruthbrenner.co.uk.

Nicola Godden has had over thirty years experience as a sculptor, working in plaster and clay for bronze casting. Over the years she has worked on many site specific public works with property companies and other organisations; her most recent was the Icarus sculpture for the Olympic Village in London 2012. The bulk of her work has been private work of various sizes exhibited in galleries in the U.K, Channel Islands, Ireland and America. Nicola’s work is nearly always based on the human figure whether in an abstract from or in a realistic way. She has always wanted to work from the human form because of the feelings and emotions it conveys.

She currently has a show at Duncan R. Miller Fine Arts in St. James’s, London.

Find out more at www.nicolagodden.com.

Selected Exhibitions.
Curated, Mystic, CT. USA.
The Sculpture Garden,  Surrey.
Imagine Gallery, Suffolk.
CCA Galleries,  Jersey.
Hay Hill Gallery,  Baker Street, London.
Wimbledon Fine Arts. London.
Art Parks International, Guernsey.
Chelsea Flower Show, London.
Henley Arts and Music Festival.
The Wykeham Gallery,  Stockbridge.
Tom Caldwell Gallery, Dublin and Belfast.
The Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, Surrey.
Sarah Wiseman Gallery, Oxford .
Jonathan Poole Gallery, Gloucestershire.
Hiscox Art Café. The City, London.

Selected Public Commissions:
‘Icarus’ for The Olympic Village 2012.
‘Sir Peter Scott’ statue for The Berkeley Group plc and WWT Barn Elms Wetlands site, Barnes, unveiled by Sir David Attenborough.
‘Survivor’ for Eastman Kodak for headquarters in Philadelphia, USA.