I think as a kid, just kind of bashing rocks together on the beach and kind of, you know, having a go with an old wood chisel of my dad's, kind of hacking into things you find in fields. Because I grew up on the Drashic Coast, you're kind of just surrounded by fossils and stone.
Years ago, was I was very much a traveler, so and I wasn't a very good journal keeper, so I used to pick up small stones and whittle them. After a few years of running around Asia, etcetera, I ended up with what I class as travel rocks. So I used to sit on long bus journeys and whittle stones, so, you know, from from the border of Thailand to the center of Laos, I'd have one carving or something. And that that was just me messing around, really.
Since I was a kid, I remember marble everywhere and all my mother's and my father's friends, they used to be artists. We used to play on marble blocks and jumping. And so it was just the most obvious thing to to be a sculptor.
Hi. This is Sarah with another episode of Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. Today's episode has been created together with On Form, an exhibition of stone sculptures held at Astell Manor in Oxfordshire every other summer. As I drive through the rolling countryside and take the last tree lined avenue, I find tall gate posts topped with a pair of non identical pumpkin like finials by artist Anthony Turner, who along with Rosie Pearson co founded on form. The drive is wide and welcoming and it's hard not to gasp at the beauty of the magnificent manor house before me.
It's early May and behind the clip box hedges below tulips, forget me nots and bluebells. Up the cloister walls, I see clematis climbing and early buds of honeysuckle. Beyond the house are green lawns and flower beds, and pool house, woodland and meadows, all blending into the glory of the Windrush Valley beyond. Lovage, the not quite Jack Russell, barks loudly in greeting, and Ziggy the cat, with a half black, half white face sidles over curiously. The sculpture installation is in full swing.
There are lorries, tractors and trolleys, each able to transport sculptures to different parts of the garden. On the lawn in front of the house, a group of helpers stand with outstretched arms, helping the curator and sculptor judge the exact position an enormous piece should be placed. First, I speak with Rosie Pearson, owner of Asthal Manor and creative director of On Form.
I am Rosie Pearson, and I grew up in West Sussex. And I've lived in Jamaica for ten years, Kenya for a year, London for many years, and now here I am in the beautiful Windrush Valley, Astal Manor, where I've been since 1998, bringing up my two daughters, Annie and Dora, finding myself somewhat by accident in this rambling manor house in a beautiful position looking over the meandering wind rush with the stumpy willows that push up their fists into the sky in this beautiful way. I've become a I believe it might even be called a chatelaine, but I like to think of myself as a custodian of this space, which is 18 acres of beauty and increasingly nature, because we're really working at the moment on increasing the biodiversity of the site, particularly with the help of an ecologist who's here, Tim Mitchell, who's running the walled garden as some for the birds, some for the bugs, and some for us kind of food share scheme. But the prime activity that has occupied a lot of my life the last twenty two years has been on form sculpture, which is a biennial exhibition of sculpture instead.
My name is Jaya Schuerch. I grew up in California, moved to Switzerland when I was a teenager with my family, moved back to The States after high school, went to university in Zurich, went to university in California, moved to Hawaii, and then I realized what I really wanted to do with sculpture, and I made it to Italy. And I've been mostly working out of Italy for the last thirty five years. I think every artist has the material that corresponds to her inner resistance. I've worked in granite, I've worked in alabaster, limestone, but it always feels a bit like coming home when I'm working in marble.
My name is Jason Mulligan. I'm a sculptor. I'm currently working from a studio in Kent. Been based there for the last twenty years. Originally, I'm actually from Northern Ireland, you might be able to tell with the accent, it's slightly softened over the years.
I had over the last sort of two to four years been working in marble. A lot of that marble coming from Portugal, and what I would do is I would import enough material to probably allow me to sort of work for eighteen months to two years and then go and do another sort of big shopping trip. Unfortunately, with the pandemic that happened to fall right in the middle of me running out of materials, so no travel was sort of permitted. So I've kind of turned my options and started looking at English limestones again. So getting my material from Ireland and Kilkenny, Ancaster in the North Of England.
My name is Christine Madies. I'm French coming from Lyon where I spent my youth, but I've been living in Tetra santa for thirty years. I work quite a bit with zonix, for example, because then I can use the light coming through. And I work a lot with the paradox of making the stone become very very light and very animated. I think it's because I'm a very physical person, and I need to be engaged physically in in what I do.
I'm Mark Stonestreet. I'm a stone sculptor based in the South Downs. And I was a bit of a India head, etcetera. And I was speaking to my friends and one of them had been to Manipuram in 1991 or something. He said, this an amazing village.
It's just full of stone carvers by the sea. It intrigued me. So I visited there in 02/2004, and eight months later, I sold up everything I had and went and lived there for four and a half years. The advantage of India is there's a 22 different colored granites rather than I think there's five or six over here.
Is there a quick way of explaining the history?
The earliest bit, which is actually where we're sitting now, was actually that half of this big hall, was 1633, and it was somebody who was in the wool trade, believe, whose surname was Rice. And they did have a connection with the church, and the church is sort of in your face close, the most beautiful twelfth century church, which really lends its character to this house. I came here in 1998. I haven't done very much. The kitchen, I've changed a lot, opened it up, made it a livable family well, community kitchen, really.
But apart from that, we've kept the house more or less as it was. And the Mitford? Oh, Mitford connection. Yes. They were here between 1919 and 1926. They built on what's now known as the ballroom, and it's a really beautiful ceiling, sort of arts and crafts. And then above it were the rooms where the older Mitford girls and Tom, their brother, lived to sort of escape from the younger children servants.
So moving on to on form, how did that start?
That started because my old school friend, Anthony Turner, came to visit one day. That would have been 1997. Anthony and I were at school together, in sixth form Marlborough College, and we both studied French a level. And we were great friends and had stayed in touch, and he came to my wedding in Jamaica, in fact, when I married a Jamaican. Anthony's sculptures are very much about the sort of meeting place between vegetables and dreams, I would say.
He had in the back of his van various small sculptures, and we sort of started looking through them. And there was one called it was either called Plumpkin or it was called Plumpelstiltskin. At the time, I was having a discussion with the architect here about what to do about the gates and what to put on the gateposts. Because, of course, gateposts are such a thing, aren't they? Because you're either saying, I'm rather grand.
Please don't come in. Or you're thinking, I want you to say the opposite of that. I wanted to say sort of a, sorry I live in such a big house. Please come in. You might find some surprises here.
So when I saw this small sculpture, went, that's what I want on my gatepost, but I want two of them and bigger and not the same, not a pair. I was a rather sort of involved client, getting involved in the design, probably more than any sculptor would really want. But because we were old friends, that sort of happened. And then we went off to Guiding Quarry together because he wanted it to be from a local stone. And although it's very local to here, it's not really a stone that gets used in this particular village.
So the sculptures were made and, they were put up. And there was initially a lot of sort of shock around. And in fact, Radio Oxford did a thing, you know, sort of There were a couple of letters, but I don't think anybody actually complained to the council or anything like that, but there was a sort of bit of shock. And then we started to get really nice letters. And there was a couple I'll never forget, was one particular letter from a couple who were on their honeymoon and they'd been staying in the area.
And they said those sculptures lifted our hearts, you know, as they walked past.
And so that got you thinking about more?
Yes. So Anthony came to install those and his friend and colleague Dominic Welsh, they both actually had in the past worked for Peter Randall Page, and they both sort of started saying, well, this would be a good place for an exhibition. And I was sort of at that stage of thinking, right. Well, I've come back from Jamaica. I'm divorced.
I've got two children at school. So, yep, let's go for it. So and that first year, which was 02/2002, it emerged from their group of sculptors in Devon, and then I had a group of sort of friends, acquaintances, or people that I got in touch with for that person, Paul Vanstone, Luke Dickinson, Linda Bailey, but it really wasn't what you'd call curated. 02/2004, we became Allstone, and that was fantastic. And that's when Peter Randall Page first came, and we've had a piece of his work in, I think, every exhibition since then.
In 02/2005, I was introduced to Anna Greenacre, and that's when the sort of serious curation came in and the studio visits. And in the early years, Anna and I really did everything together.
I wanted to discover how one even begins planning an event like this, so I asked Anna Greenacre, the curator, to explain.
I suppose that really the first thing we do is we put it out there on the website that if you want to apply, do so by the summer before our show. And then in September, Rosie and I sit down together and we start to go through the applications. And that's a sort of three stage process. And then once we've got it down to a sort of smaller group, I then start to make the studio visits and Rosie does some as well. And because I really like to meet the sculptors in person, see their work, get a real feel because seeing photographs, as everybody knows, is not the same as seeing the work in person.
And particularly with sculpture because it's three d and it has a sort of personality and a presence that you can't experience when you look at a picture. This year we've got nearly 350 sculptures and we are uniquely it's all stone and it is actually such a special material. You know, it is magic. Noguchi talked about it being the sort of stone is the sort of heart of the matter. And when you tap stone, it touches your solar plexus.
And there are just so many colors. There's so much variety from the pure white of the Carrara marble to the lush greens of the Connemara marble, deep blacks of Kilkenny. So that's such a joy to work with in a garden, You know, with the landscape and the planting, everything comes to life. The landscape comes to life once the sculpture is placed within it.
Why did you choose just stone?
Well I was very much influenced by Anthony on that and his group of stone carvers. The thing about, as you call it, direct carving as opposed to casting, is that it's a collaboration between the material and the artist. The fact that you can't always do what you want with the stone and the stone dictates. And, you know, I think in some ways that is a metaphor for our relationship with the world. And that we we can put our mark on it, but please, can we listen to the earth and allow it to have its way sometimes on us and not think that we can just be the masters.
Beautifully put. I feel the same. I think that stone is a conversation. I know you have a very strong commitment to only stone, which is quite rare.
The first reason was about the collaboration with the Stones. So there's the sense of time within it because of the fossils, and the, you know, these ancient materials. There's the fact that you you can invite people to touch it, which is not true of all materials. And of course, it does have it does have an effect, as you can see from, you know, the theater with the sort of shiny toes, which are almost worn away by many centuries of adoration. And, you know, we love that.
We think that that is part of it. It so it does respond to touch, but only very, very slowly. So the maximum we have through here in an exhibition is is 10,000. I think this year, we have restricted the numbers somewhat, so we will probably have 8,000. Anthony always says that you start with your sanding, with your polishing, you go up the grades of the of the sandpaper, and then the final grade is the human touch, and that gives it the final grade of polish.
It takes on the warmth of the sun, the birds love them, which does have its drawbacks. This is surprising me, but I'm finding that I'm suddenly going to give a nod to my ex husband because I remember many years ago, before I had anything to do with this, I remember a conversation where he said something about stone grows. This is a very characterful Jamaican, my ex husband. And he said, no, you know, stone does grow. And all these sort of English people mean, no, it doesn't.
And of course it does because, you know, that's how stone is made. And, you know, even stones, once they are exposed to the elements, they grow. But at the time when they're a sculpture, they have been stilled. So particularly in a garden where you've got the plants pushing up and growing at such an incredibly vigorous and almost visible rate, And then you've got the stone where all that growth has already happened and then being engaged with by the sculptor. You know, he just it just doesn't relate to anything else.
My name is Lotte, Lotte Thuenker. I'm born and raised in Germany and I studied in Berlin. I studied architecture and I worked as an architect for many years there. This is a very nice Carrara marble. You see that it has veins, not too strong ones. Sometimes I work even with very strong veins so that it gives an idea of a design piece. But this one is a good quality, it's not the very best quality. But it's nice. It's nice to work. Maybe I have to show you with the with the other one.
Yeah. It sounds different. The old artichanee, when they look for a really good block of marble, they take the chisel and they bang it and they can hear from the sound if it's a good piece. They hear if there is a defect, then it sounds different. But when you have a nice beautiful quality, it sounds like a bell.
Is this statuario?
This is a statuario and this one nearly has no vein at all. You see it has some little tiny spots in it, but it's it's kind of perfect.
I think this is my fourth on form, and I get to come and there's often eight or nine sculptors. It's one of the few occasions that you can obsess about stone.
I'm Ben Russell and I'm a stone carver. I definitely like to play with the texture because of the way it kind of catches the light and because I come from that background of using kind of hammer and chisel. There's lots of texture you can get with that that you wouldn't be able to maybe get with like an angle grinder or, you know, the way some people would work on like a bigger sculpture. Always like to kind of put some hand tooling in somewhere, but it only lends to kind of the tactile nature of it.
Each time you work a stone, you have a couple of days fumbling around with it because you're trying to find the right chisel, the right angle grinding blade that's gonna kind of remove the most material or whatever, and sometimes the stone sort of dictates to you how it wants to be treated really.
In sharing your garden, what was your main intention?
I knew that I wanted to use this space for conversation. And I discovered early on that sculpture is the most wonderful generator of conversation, often between strangers. I want to say, please talk to strangers. It's really important because some people come in here and they're they're quite sort of scared initially and they go, what is all this? You know, and they think an art terrifies them because it's sort of they see art as part of, you know, the institution, the the establishment because it often is.
Whereas actually, it should be the opposite of the establishment. It should be all the things that don't fit in. And, you know, that's why I just love that question. What is it? What is it supposed to be?
Because there is no supposed, you know. It is up to the viewer to connect with. So that was really it was much more about sort of establishing conversations, allowing people to feel free, allowing people to feel welcome, allowing people not to feel scared by big houses, allowing people to feel that they had a right to be here. I feel that for a sort of Cotswolds attraction of this type, our visitors are more diverse than average, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. And it's you know, I put that down to the welcoming attitude of all the sculptors, all the people who work here, Anna, Emelina, Ilka, Deandra, all the people who've worked here over the years have been, you know, smiling is the most important thing that you can do if you're standing out there.
What are the events?
As usual, there will be sculptors with the, you know, on at a certain time of just standing by their sculpture, either doing a walk around or standing by one sculpture and talking about it. And then we're also because we do know that a lot of people come here mainly for the garden. So Owen Vaughan, who's the head gardener, is going to do once a week a walk around the garden talking about the garden.
My name is Owen Vaughan. I'm the head gardener here at Astell Manor. At Astell especially, we almost put nature first. So we create a beautiful garden, but everything we do is now has to have a role for wildlife. So obviously, the roses provide the single roses provide lots of pollen, and the way we prune the roses here as well creates enormous nesting potential for the goldfinches that are resident here.
If you walked around, you will see just hundreds of birds emerging from the roses. So that's one aspect, that's sort of a habitat that sort of where we're sat now, we're just starting to look over the wildflower meadows, which hold an abundance of wildflower species and hugely important for wildlife. We manage it as a wildflower, sort of a hay meadow, so we'll start cutting in the July. The historically, used to cut all of the meadows, about two acres or so, in one day, let that dry and collect it. Whereas now, last year, we just tried last year that we'd start cutting in patchworks, so we can leave wildlife corridors through the meadow.
There's an abundance of robins as well, which are fantastic. So you guarantee as soon as you start working, as soon as you break soil, there will be robins at your feet, which is lovely. And then what we've spotted recently is there's a lot of song thrushes which are fledged now. So we see them hopping around the hopping around the gardens. The funny with all again, because we're providing such a beautiful natural landscape for the wildlife, The bird numbers are incredibly high.
And as such, we've just sown an awful lot of wildflower seed for this year, and we actually had a problem where there were so many birds, they were eating most of the lovage, and it's now gone.
Tim Mitchell in the walled garden is going to give composting help to people and talk about the wonderful community supported agriculture project that we have going over there, which is run as much for the bugs and the birds as it is for people to eat the food. Tim, as an ecologist, has helped me to sort of sharpen my thinking quite a bit and is a sounding board for me on other things that are happening in other parts of the property. One of our partner charities this year is the Witchwood Forest Trust and another is Wild Oxfordshire. So those are both, you know, really helpful for, giving us advice. And I'm hoping that during the weeks that they're here, because each charity has a week when they are sort of in residence at the manor and at the exhibition.
And I'm hoping to gain from that, you know, some expertise. We don't like sitting down events because the whole of enforme is about flow. It's about moving through the garden, looking at the relationships between the different sculptures, finding the hidden paths, you know, that kind of thing. So we have a geologist who comes and looks at the stones. So we have walks that are focused on a particular thing.
A geologist who comes look at the stones, Owen Vaughn, the head gardener, who, you know, shows you some of the plans for the garden and, you know, how the garden works and what the philosophy behind it is. I may well do some tours unscheduled. Anna will certainly do some tours unscheduled. We've got an artist in residence this year, Kieran Styles, who is in residence during installation. He was here yesterday, sketching people installing and also sketching the garden as it begins to come into shape as on form.
He's wonderful on color, and he will also be running, I think it's two or possibly three days of painting workshops, with a focus on light and form and color and the relationship between the plants and the stones. There's always a sculpture in every painting that any of his students do because he loves it as sort of punctuation marks and how it affects the composition of the painting. So that's really interesting too.
I talked to some of the sculptors about what they loved about working in stone.
When I moved to India, to the temple carving village, so they carve Hindu temples from around the world, and their predominant stone is granite. There was no marble there. There was it was just granite. So I just learned on it, and to this day, I love granite, and I think it's got the sort of the connection with me is is when I sold up everything, gave up everything, went to get a stone carver. I still have that kind of emotional attachment to the stone.
People laugh at me because it's a hard stone. Most people won't touch it, but I just have this connection with it that stayed with me, really.
I know some people who work in granite, other people work in bronze, which is actually very soft material because you your work is actually in the wax or in clay. And for some reason, I can't really explain, the marble corresponds to what I need inside. I need something to slow me down long enough to see the details. I move way too fast. Wood is too soft.
I make too many mistakes. Clay is too mushy. It's like get a backbone. Stand up straight. Marble has really that quality of being as soft as butter when you're using the right tools and something that just is so satisfying.
You know, the quality of light that marble has and the way that the shadows and light dances across the surface of polished marble, I just think that sort of it speaks of clouds. It speaks of that sort of light fluffiness. Recently, I'm playing around with different colored marbles, sort of making this idea of a sunrise or a sunset, thinking about the different colors in the sky.
Especially if if it has veins, is very inspiring because the play of the waves with those veins makes it very vibrant somehow. For me, it's really a joy and it's really the interaction between my kind of vision and the things that I find in the in the stone because the the patterns of the veins, etcetera, etcetera. That's what's going to orientate my final design, let's say.
Kilkenny limestone, Blue Irish limestone, it's a relatively hard limestone and it takes a really good edge. Stone people call this an arriss, when you have a tight, sharp edge. So, sometimes it's almost metallic and you can kind of do most things with it. It's not quite the perfect carbon materialised marble, for example, but I really like it. It's got a very hard resistance, so you have to actually do everything to it really.
I've chosen to sort of change how I kind of physically work and with the marbles, there's a lot more grinding and power tools, but with the limestones, they're slightly softer, so there's a certain degree of kind of hand finishing and it's the first time I've carved a stone which actually comes from Northern Ireland which I've never used before, so it's got another connection with my heritage and it's called Armagh marble and it's a beautiful deep burgundy color.
The installation period gives a fascinating insight into what goes on behind the scenes and I was keen to know more.
Installing stone sculpture is a huge thing and it takes time. We now allow about six weeks. It used to be much, much shorter and I would say much more stressful. Now I try to limit it to three sculptures a day so they arrive at a certain time, quite often changes, but that's the idea. And in their flatbed vans or lorries or they might need to hire a van and there are gantries involved, which are these big either tripods with a chain and then the sculptures are strapped with these huge great straps and then the the gantry sort of hooks on and lifts it up and this is if it's going onto a plinth and then they lower them onto the plinth.
But even setting up the gantries takes quite a long time and then we get in sack trucks, pallet trucks and all sorts of sort of wheelie extra things and wood to go on the ground if we need to use fill with a tractor but we can only use fill in certain parts of the garden and in the meadow. So the very large, anything over a tonne, when I'm placing, there are certain areas that I can only use for those.
Because it's a time for photography, for the catalogue that is coming up, we have to submit all those photos and then have them as well updated for the website and because you know finally outside is nice and bright, so today's the day to really and truly get the pictures you know. So yeah, so we had to take off all the cloths and the covers for the sculptures and then scrub them off and then the photographer now is going around and taking the pictures.
The installation itself is pretty hard work, but it's great to be that close to other people's work and it's fantastic. I think they find it difficult to get rid of me.
We've dug a hole that was slightly larger than the sculptures to make sure they sit in okay, so I'm packing the turf back in around them to shore them up a bit and make it look nice and tidy.
So there's some gravel in there. Has that got a function?
Yep. Well, the gravel, it levels the ground up to make sure they're sitting on a nice even keel. It creates a more firm base than just sitting on soft grass.
Working with them has always been absolutely wonderful. They have put us up. We stay at the manor. They're incredibly generous, it's beautiful, they make sure that we're very well taken care of. You feel valued as an artist and that is not always the experience I've had.
I think one of the things about being a stone sculptor is, you know, they're forced to go slow. They have to go slow. It's not a speedy process and they also have to go with their mistakes because when they come across a fault line or when they chip something that they didn't mean to, there's no sort of painting it over it like with oil paint or rubbing it out as a drawing and I just think more and more over the years, you'll feel quite emotional about that.
You know, it's taught me to really go with what is and yeah, I think that's incredibly important in life.
Of course, I wanted to discover what sort of work the sculptors have prepared to show it on form this year.
I'm taking eight pieces. One is quite big because it's two meters long and it's a kind of ribbon, let's say, and they all have to do with sea creatures or fluidity.
Marble from this area, Carrara marble, and I love to do these triples or trio or how you would call them, like little families. So they talk together, so they're closer, or they're in one line, they're going somewhere, or they are not interested in each other anymore, and you can play around with them. I love that.
Predominantly marble. There are a few granite pieces. I I am very interested in my work in light and internal space, negative space, etcetera, and patterns and lines with marble because it has a different play with light than granite. A lot of them have been hollowed out, large rocks that have been hollowed out, etcetera. So, I mean, it's been a very experimental couple of years.
During lockdown, actually, there was a couple of podcasts on BBC Radio four, with Neil MacGregor, and it was quite kind of poignant because it sort of was leading into an area of research and exploratory work that I'd been sort of focusing on at the last On Form, the On Form Unlocked, where I was looking at gods and deities, idols, how we represent figureheads in different cultures, and how those sometimes manifest into sculptural objects. And as he sort of spoke about the wide variety of different aspects from Irish culture, Celtic culture, right through to Hindu and Buddhism, they all started to somehow inform what I was actually doing.
I love the idea of the sort of symbolism of clouds, the sort of spirituality. You know, for a lot of people clouds are heaven. Clouds are where God lives. But, you know, I mean, I'm not particularly religious myself, but the iCloud is the place where we store all of our stories, all of our pictures and things. And clouds, there's a surprising amount of TV shows, movies that use clouds as their kind of opening scene, as almost their identity.
There's actually been a sort of extraordinary surprise this year that we hadn't fully seen coming, which is that a lot of people come to this exhibition and say, oh, they've got more animals than usual, because several of our sculptors quite independently have been carving something that is either animal or animal related or animals gone bonkers.
Four years ago or five, I'm not sure, I saw some pictures on the internet of this very, very super cute little sheep. I really wanted to get some to to put here in my I have like this olive grove and and so I did a research and an Internet and I contact a place. It's a special brand that they they stay small. And I brought them here, like, I had four. So at the beginning, there was Sibilla, Merone, Bruno, and Lino.
Can you tell me about the animals who live here?
You mean the animals that are not made of stone? Paddington and Ziggy are both 14 years old, and they are moggies, I believe they're called. In other words, cats of no particular breeding, who are brothers. And lovage is apparently, from a DNA test that was done on one of her siblings, 80% Jack Russell and 20% Papillon, which is that little miniature spaniel that is called a papillon because its ears look like a butterfly. She's very, very lovely and she's very much a character of her own.
She does bark rather too much.
What sort of things have you learnt from working with the sculptors?
I think the concerns of the sculptors have changed over the years. And, you know, entirely not unexpectedly, climate concerns and biodiversity concerns have really risen to the fore. Many of the sculptors, if not all, have very low carbon lifestyles. Tom Waugh had a wonderful concept of fossils of the future. So he carved an oil can as a fossil coming out of a rock because, you know, this will you know, it's fossil fuels, but it's also, you know, the end of the oil age, so these will be the fossils of the future.
Can you tell me more about your commitment to green?
So increasingly, as on form has developed, and as I put talked previously about the themes, my understanding and concern for the natural world, both the sort of emergency of climate change, but also the biodiversity crisis I have been an activist in the Green Party for about fifteen years in that I have helped in other people's elections. I have just been elected as a Green Party Councillor on the West Oxfordshire District Council. So I think the politics is only one of the ways in which we have to address the planetary and biodiversity crisis, that it's much more about enabling, about opening up the conversation, about being honest. So one of the things I'd love to do is to encourage more people to get involved in really, really local non party based politics. Not that everybody has to be pure and, you know, never have a plastic bag in their life or not drive a car.
We all have to do what we can. And we all, you know I think blame is the thing that has has to exit now. It's not about blame. My great grandfather was a Victorian industrialist, and that's why I'm sitting here now. And I don't blame him for having used oil, discovered oil, actually made money from oil, and also built lots and lots of bridges and tunnels.
He did what seemed right to him at the time. But that was the beginning of the oil age, and we're now at the end of it. And we have to use the same ingenuity that those Victorian entrepreneurs at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution used to learn to come down to transition. Not everybody. I mean, of course, lots of people choose to, you know, lead a quiet life and not get involved, and that's part of the process too.
But, you know, those who have ideas and think they won't be heard, we have to let them know that they will.
We talk sometimes about the sculptors slowing down. How do you notice coming to On Form impacts your visitors?
The extreme version is when you get people who arrive absolutely furious because they've been brought here and they don't like art and what's it all about? And then if you can track those people and find them when they're leaving, they're often completely blissed out because they spent two or three hours touching the stone, not being asked to be clever about it, with no words, no labels. That's terribly important when people say, what does it mean or what is it? I have been known to say, you know, if you hear people asking that question, it really doesn't matter. It's it's whatever it wants to be to you.
It's whatever you see it as. And the best people to get that are children. And what we love is open ended questions on our children questionnaire like which of the sculptures could you imagine talking to each other or coming to life when we've all gone to bed? Or choose two sculptures that you think would like to be friends with each other or something like that.
Children love sculpture. They can't miss a sculpture. They see sculpture, three-dimensional work, they see it before they see, I don't know, painting or something like that because they're so tactile. They need to touch, they love to crawl on it if they can.
I asked sculptors and staff at On Form to give their tips on what to look for at On Form this year.
You have to touch, you have to feel, you have to understand through your hands what sculpture is. You have to walk around it to see the different aspects. Even with my pieces, who move, you have all the time, you have a different view to the piece and it seems always new and surprising to you.
I'd say definitely try the strawberry ice cream at the potting shed if it's available this year. It's lovely vegan strawberry ice cream, delicious. And I would also say just make sure you spend some time in the woods because it's a very peaceful place. Down at the bottom of the garden there's like a wooded area with lots of little sculptures and a stream and it's very lovely.
Diversity. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like even though some sculptures might maybe look similar, everyone has a different story and I believe that you can see it in their work. It's pretty exciting.
Don't trip over trip hazard.
Oh, so your mushrooms are trip hazard?
One of them is called trip hazard. The one with a nibble out of it.
Oh, do elaborate.
But it's got a human kind of bite mark out of it. So firstly, see if you can spot it and then don't trip over it.
So it's a pun.
Yes. I got there. Absolutely
with an open mind and there's no right way around the garden and the sculptures. We want it to be a free flowing, relaxed experience for everybody and there really is, you know, we quite often get asked, oh, which is the correct route? And there really is no route. There's a map in the back of the catalogue and all the sculptures are numbered so you'll know what everything is and we even have a tick box at the back to make sure that you've seen every area if you're that way inclined. But there's no right way and you know we're open from eleven till five and it's a very beautiful joyous experience.
Don't worry, touch the sculptures, spend time with a few of the sculptures, don't judge them. I mean of course there are going to be ones you like and ones you don't like. See if you can see the sculptor's touch, the sculptor's mark. When you're touching the sculptures, you're touching the work that the sculptors have made and see if you can touch them through the sculptures. You know, just allowing yourself to feel.
Please let yourself I mean we do have people weeping sometimes but you know, you don't have to. Please feel free to come alone is quite important. You don't have to come with a friend. Don't worry too much, you know, we provide you with a map, but get lost if you possibly can. There is no way you can go round this exhibition without doubling back on your tracks at some stage. Wear sensible shoes, please.
I'm really proud of Mum and she's worked really hard to make something and I think for me what makes me very proud is the fact that she takes a lot less commission than most art galleries. Like, think it's something like, normally it's 50%, and here it's 20%. So the sculptors, rather than coming all this way and working so hard and basically making no money, they actually manage to, you know, make a living out of it when they sell one here. So I really am proud of that.
Thanks to all the staff and artists who contributed to this episode, including Rosie Pearson, Anna Greenacre, Owen Vaughan, Deandra Barrett, Annie Taylor, Sergio Boroni, Rob Good, Jason Mulligan, Christine Madies, Richard Perry, Ben Russell, Jaya Shirk, Mark Stonestreet and Lottie Thuncker. For more information, see Onform's website onformsculpture.co.uk or follow them on Instagram onformsculpture. And thanks to you for listening. As with all episodes, you can find photographs of the work discussed on our exhibition of On Form runs from June to July. It's closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and tickets are only available online.