Sculptor, draughtsman and teacher, born in Essex, but grew up in Sussex. He studied at Bath Academy of Art (1973–77) and, after carrying out conservation work on the thirteenth-century sculptures at Wells Cathedral, was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship to study marble carving in Italy (1980). He works mainly in stone, using natural forms such as shells, fossils, fruits, eggs, cones and seed pods as source material for exploring the abstract and geometric patterns that underlie the dynamics of biological growth. Significant bodies of text have also been included in some recent works, such as The One and the Many, Fitzroy Place, London (2015), which incorporates stories inscribed in writing systems ranging from cuneiform to contemporary scripts. He has produced work in collaboration with environmental groups such as Common Ground, including the ‘New Milestones’ and ‘Local Distinctiveness’ projects (1986–96), and in 2006 his Give and Take, a massive boulder work produced for the Cass Sculpture Foundation at Goodwood and now in Newcastle, was the winner of the Marsh Award for Public Sculpture. He has taught at Brighton Polytechnic, the Royal College of Art, Dartington College of Arts, and the University of Tasmania; has been a member of the design team at the Eden Project, Cornwall; and has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter, and St John University, York.
Source: Peter Randall-Page website.
Ray McKenzie 2018
