Imaginative Sculpture, Protecting the Sacred Space

Imaginative Sculpture Protecting the Sacred Space

Behemoth

by Ben Tambaschi

My goal was to make a bold, contemporary design that was both relevant to English mediaeval art and rooted in Christian iconography. The mouth of hell as an image originates in 9th Century Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts, and was a popular motif in English and Continental art well into the Middle Ages.

Imaginative Sculpture Protecting the Sacred Space An exhibition celebrating the Imaginative Sculpture programme creating new grotesques for St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, continuing a 650 year old sculptural tradition.

Generously Supported by Frederic and Jean Sharf

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Imaginative Sculpture Protecting the Sacred Space Foreword by the Dean of Windsor, the Right Reverend David Conner KCVO

The College of St George, a religious fellowship living and working within the walls of Windsor Castle was established 660 years ago. At the centre of the College stands the beautiful St George’s Chapel. It is at the very core of our life.

Down through the years, we have always understood our central purpose to be to worship God. It is our vocation to ensure that the Christian spiritual pulse and a sense of accountability to God should be kept alive at the heart of our national institutions.

The Dean and Canons of Windsor are committed to the protection and conservation of St George’s Chapel as a legacy for present and future generations.

This exhibition gives us an opportunity to share with others one particular project that has revived a 650 year old sculptural tradition. In mediaeval times grotesque sculptures were intended to celebrate the diversity of the secular world and to protect the sacred space by dispelling evil spirits. Surviving mediaeval contracts suggest that these sculptures were conceived as decorative embellishments to enrich the architecture whilst incorporating significant religious symbolism.

Phoenix

by Clementine Nuttall

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The College of St George has been working in partnership with the City and Guilds London Art School in establishing an imaginative carving programme which is producing exciting new grotesque sculptures for the Chapel. The replacement sculptures which you see in this catalogue aim to reproduce the scale, massing and detail of the original mediaeval conception whilst allowing students the opportunity to be inventive in their designing new carvings.

The exhibition tells the story of this work. The project has offered young carvers an opportunity, within a set of governing parameters, to exercise their imagination.

It is our privilege to support students in developing their skills and therefore in becoming more visually confident and expressive artists. In this way we aspire to recreating something of the spirit of mediaeval masons.

At the centre of this exhibition and publication are the grotesque sculptures; the creative product of our collaboration. I hope that you will enjoy these images as an expression of a youthful, vibrant and energetic initiative that has borne much fruit and which we hope, with our interest and encouragement, will continue to flourish.

We are enormously grateful to Frederic and Jean Sharf for their generous funding of this exhibition.

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Armadillo

by Ben Russell

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New Grotesques for St George’s Chapel, Windsor Tony Carter, Principal 2000-2014, City and Guilds of London Art School

The Commission When, in the Spring of 2005, representatives of the Fabric Advisory Committee to the Dean and Canons of Windsor first approached the School as a prospective supplier of new grotesques for St George’s Chapel, they needed first to be assured that the level of skill within the student group was equal to the task and that the challenge of delivering twelve carvings to contract was manageable within the constraints of the course curriculum.

The discussions which took place seemed to provide those assurances, though it was evident that both the carvings themselves and the project management involved would need to satisfy highest professional standards, also that student status notwithstanding, sentiment could play no part in the approval for final installation of the new work. This, it should be said, was no tyranny imposed by the Fabric Advisory Committee nor the Dean and Canons but a function of their responsibility; St George’s Chapel is one of the world’s great buildings of its period and style and it is the still resonant glories it presents that set the standard.

A significant act of faith was evidently necessary to progress this initiative, even though there was ample evidence of the quality of past achievement by graduates of the carving department. This was to be a most singular project and subject to exacting criteria.

One of the first things that had to be considered was that whilst the main purpose of the Carving course had always been to train replication carvers whose skills were likely to be more technical than ‘creative’, the grotesques to be replaced were, in many cases, degraded to the extent that nothing very substantial survived to be copied; I like to think that only the ‘ghosts’ remained and these would have been hard to identify, even harder to replicate! In fact, the ghosts represented the only legacy to which we might have obligations, though at this early stage we did not clearly see how or why that might be. What we did know, however, was that many of the grotesques were Victorian replicas which by general consensus and degraded or otherwise, were not the best models for reference. Evidently, another dimension of input was necessary which would be extra to our normal programme. Its purpose would be to encourage imagination and the search for a contemporary reality for the new grotesques whilst being mindful of the need for stylistic consistency with the aesthetic of a mediaeval building.

The objective was exciting but by no means straightforward and certainly more difficult to achieve than most of the students were to realise at the outset.

Foreseeable difficulties notwithstanding, the project was begun and the first drawings and models were produced

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Dormouse

by Florence Glasspool

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Ram

On holiday in Rome I was crossing Ponte Mazzini when I spotted on the base of the lamp posts four striking

by Tom Merrett

rams in bronze. I had been thinking about ideas for a grotesque before my visit, on seeing these rams I realised what a perfect design a rams head could be. The big forms, with the long nose and the large curling horns would give strong contrast of light and shade making it very readable from the ground.

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within a matter of weeks. A flexible schedule of meetings was conceived which would bring members of the Sculpture sub-committee to the School on a fairly regular basis. These were John Maine RA, Canon John White CVO, Canon Laurence Gunner (who unfortunately retired shortly after the project began), Richard Halsey MBE (Chairman of the group), John Goodall, architectural editor for Country Life Magazine, and Martin Ashley MVO, Dipl Arch RIBA, Surveyor of the Fabric to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle; all were to contribute generously to seminars alongside staff and students of the School.

From the carvers’ point of view, these seminars could be quite daunting and the individuals concerned were, from the beginning, frequently made uneasy by their subjection to criteria more complex than those to which they were accustomed. With hindsight, however, the experience was usually seen to have been constructive; the character of a discourse appreciated for the breadth of its concerns, was found always to be interesting and challenging. It soon became apparent that without being too self-conscious about it, we were probably laying foundations for an imaginative or ‘creative’ carving course, of a kind that would be unique in the context of contemporary art-education. Since becoming Principal, I had always hoped this discourse might evolve naturally as a by-product of the proximity of Fine Art Sculpture and Historic Carving in the close confines of C&G Art School, but it could not be forced; though there had been a few individual examples that kept the idea alive, it had so far remained more hypothetical than real. This should not have been surprising, since Fine Art practice has been for a long time sceptical about the role of craft skill as an inspirational force for its own purpose and the trained craftsmen equally sceptical about the prioritising of concept over skill which they saw as defining the condition of Fine Art practice through the same period; this was and is the legacy of a twentieth century concept of the artist as an alienated idealist living and working within the social mainstream but not entirely of it. The substantial evidence of social and cultural disillusion which followed from two world-wars ensured that whatever form the idealistic project took it should be uncompromising in its personal integrity. Conventional craft-skills were not, in themselves, seen as guaranteeing either the political or metaphysical insights that would represent the currency of value in this act of conscience and, though the prejudices involved are not now so clearly entrenched as they were, this particular model of meaning or purpose in ‘Fine’ Art casts a long shadow.

The problem of Art versus Craft In the minds of many of its participants Fine Art began to be a ‘conceptual’ practice in the 1960s and 70s.

Spontaneity had already taken precedence over the slower paced applications of craft-skill, and meaning became increasingly dependent on verbal exposition after the fact. Art and craft practices obviously had things in common, not least their recourse to a similar range of media, but their cultural purposes had become different in kind, even to the extent that when traditional craft skills were particularly evident in the would-be art object, they were as likely to be seen as obscuring its main purpose as of being a vehicle for its expression, and the more virtuosic the skill, the greater the suspicion that it concealed, or attempted to compensate for, the absence of what really mattered. What that might be – what really matters – is perhaps harder to define now than ever, but it would seem to have presupposed a form of self-evident truth in terms of medium and message; an equivalent

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perhaps of the divine spark that Salieri found in the music of Mozart but could not find in his own work, nor acquire by any amount of devotion to his craft or his God. Post-Modernism, Marxist informed models of critical theory and their by-product – cultural relativism, complicated things further by proposing that in matters of comparative value, one object (or opinion?) is not better than another but only different – a position which could effectively destroy the legacy of a Modernist or any other inherited canon. As it is, the now almost infinite extension of art’s ontology permits gestures in its name which need produce no aesthetic object at all.

There are, of course, many current examples of artists sub-contracting the craftsman’s skills to materialise their ‘concept’ but still within a model of practice inclined to prioritise the ‘idea’ and to see it as recoverable from and essentially independent of its material manifestation. As long as this impression persists, what will be at stake or put at risk is the continuing credibility of art’s tactile-visual conventions as a first-order language, i.e. able to originate rather than merely illustrate thought.

Participants in our project would need to understand something of the origins of this problem to rise above it.

Their area of skill had been, after all, one of the conspicuous victims of mainstream thinking in the philosophy of art’s modernist legacy i.e. a classic example of an applied craft skill rather than Art in a purist sense. There was something to fight for and we were being offered the perfect opportunity and context in which to make our point.

A Creative Carving Course – First Steps The first indicator that the creative demands of the commission might seriously expose the (current) imaginative limitations of our carvers emerged from a seminar at Windsor following the first presentation of clay models to the members of the Fabric Advisory Committee. We had presented something like eighteen models for consideration and as far as anyone could tell they had been reasonably well received.

By way of providing a context for discussion, Canon White had delivered an instructive, illustrated lecture on mediaeval Sculpture. He had also provided in advance of that an excellent lunch in his own apartment which he prepared himself. The conviviality of the occasion may well have created a false sense of security among his guests; this was soon to be dispelled! John (Canon White) moved from the substance of his lecture to the purpose of the seminar on the back of a question: – ‘where do we go from here?’ Evidently, an appropriate answer would need to be more than just a reiteration of the terms of contract i.e. – that 12 grotesques be delivered by such and such a date. There might also have been just a hint in the question that the models themselves were not providing an answer – were not yet managing to inspire confidence. John supplemented the first question – which had elicited no very confident response – with a suggestion that the models might have benefited from embracing greater risk in the making process. An increasingly nervous group of carvers were evidently none the wiser for this (to them) enigmatic remark, but efforts were made, nonetheless, to *‘The Painted Word’. Tom Wolfe, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

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Snail

by Ivan Cudby

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Seahorse

by Sarah Liptrot

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explore the meaning of ‘risk’ as a creative concept rather than as something to be avoided. I found myself thinking that the same proposition would not have been so problematic for a majority of Fine Art students in a comparable situation; for them, the encouragement to follow imagination away from the usual comfort zone would have been neither so mysterious nor disturbing, but then, they would not have been in possession of the technical skills that the C&G carving students had already acquired to a high degree, nor of a certain sense of security that went with them. One might wonder, therefore, whether over-refined technical skills might indeed be a problem in certain circumstances? The answer would surely have to be that the skills are not in themselves the problem, but that almost by definition they will tend, if allowed, to reiterate the forms and formulae of a conservative – even a moribund – aesthetic, giving rise to predictable and academic results which would not have served us well.

The challenge being laid down by Canon White was very much to the point and penetrated to the core of the art / craft antipathy. He had shown examples in his lecture of some extraordinary mediaeval carvings that were audacious, imaginative and still full of vitality to the contemporary eye. Nothing was particularly wrong with what we had produced so far, but neither was anything notably exciting. What had begun to happen, however, was the flexing of imaginative muscle; it would just need considerably more exercise to get us to where we needed to be. For the moment it seemed, it was back to the drawing board and the ‘banker’ but with at least a license to take more risks!

In fact, things were not quite so negative as they might have seemed; we also took away from the discussions at Windsor some interesting thoughts on the nature of grotesques and their purpose, and on the matter of ‘bestiaries’ which once had provided a kind of lexicon of exotic creatures drawn from a combination of informed experience, hearsay and possibly over-excited imagination! When the tradition was still alive out of which specific embodiments of these prototypes emerged, the family of grotesques would symbolise in either single cases or collectively a range of characters which reflected both the sacred and the profane realms of human experience, as if their qualification to be guardians of the sacred space derived as much from the acquisition of worldly wisdom as from the embodiment of piety – a case of fire to fight fire, one might think.

Establishing Momentum / Reaching First-Base We had no bestiary as such, but there were other potential sources of the exotic, more of our time and closer to home, and these were what we needed to nurture.

Like most educational institutions in the UK, C&G Art School is significantly multicultural in its student profile and among our first generation of carvers to be involved in the Windsor project were individuals of French, Indian, Japanese, British and British-Caribbean origin.

Collectively, they represented a rich variety of cultural inheritance which in the atelier context we were looking to create might ‘cross-pollinate’ to good effect. Whether this has as yet really been the case is not clear, but

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something began to enhance the quality of imaginative performance by the time we were considering our first carvings into Stone: A particularly notable early example represented a crouching female body which succeeded in being both contained and dynamic in its form. When asked to describe his thinking, its maker Gary March had said: “I had an image in my mind which I thought might be suitable and which would combine several distinct but related thoughts: a mother shielding her child from harm; stylised hair representing ‘wings’ of sanctuary; a sheltering womb. I imagined them unified within a spiral and achieving climax in one direction, infinite expansion in the other.

My exploratory efforts proved to be slightly larger than the final dimensions would allow. This required adjustment to the angle of the legs and a proportional enlargement of the feet. The latter alteration worried me at first but eventually seemed to enhance the suggestion of a pelvic cradle within which life was held secure.”

The carving makes complete sense of that description, which in itself is testimony of a kind to its quality.

But it would be wrong to suppose that a resolved and convincing visual image follows automatically from a verbal rationale or even its counterpart in the mind’s eye. The unified form had to be discovered, and Gary’s achievement had been to find a way of integrating the separate elements of his idea into the terms of Sculpture and in the medium of stone. For that to happen to the extent that it did required degrees of flexibility in the shaping of the work far beyond the normal brief for replication carving. There were, in fact, probably four or five stages through which the evolving image progressed, each of which gave measure to the distance between an idea in the abstract and the fulfilled promise of that idea in its final and embodied state.

In this case, the artist’s own description of altering the angle of the legs and the scale of the feet could be taken to record the correcting of an error of judgement and no more, but that would fail to acknowledge the essentially empirical nature of creative practice; in its terms, the material as it is being worked will always seem to resist some of the overtures we make but be responsive to others – as if by magic. The negotiations between the subject and the object (the carver and the stone) cannot fail to activate precedents within the tradition, even if unconsciously; the substance of these will not infiltrate the working process randomly, but rather in response to the object’s need at critical points of impasse. One might say that the artist is, in this sense, an intermediary between a kind of hidden blue-print and its translation into material form.

I don’t know whether Gary had foreseen the spirit of William Blake, the 19th Century visionary poet-painter, being quite so present in the finished work? If he had seen the frontispiece to Blake’s ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ he would certainly have recognised the close formal correspondence between the crouching figure included there and the form of his own sculpture. But equally, if it had been a conscious aim, his transcription is brilliantly adapted into sculptural form and helped to that extent by the stylistic example of Jacob Epstein whose

Mother Earth

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by Gary March I had an image in my mind which I thought might be suitable and which would combine several distinct but related thoughts: a mother shielding her child from harm; stylised hair representing ‘wings’ of sanctuary; a sheltering womb.

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Yali

by Raja Sekaran

© Tate, London 2014

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characteristic monumentality of form coincides perfectly with the heroic scale of Blake’s imagination. To bridge successfully the gap between the different conventions of pictorial and sculptural language is very difficult and usually better for being instinctive than calculated. Either way, it doesn’t matter to the outcome in this case; the legacies of both these artists – Blake and Epstein – lend power to a sculpture which in all essentials is original. Against the spiritual background of St George’s Chapel, the earthbound connotations of the pelvic form and ‘enlarged’ feet combine with the spiral swirl of hair to give metaphysical scale to the concept of impregnation and, by virtue of having unified its historic influences so seamlessly, the sculpture manages to be stylistically timeless. It is art of real quality and, if part of our purpose was indeed to develop a creative carving course within the brief of our traditional training in craft skill, it was a ‘breakthrough’.

Significantly, in this and other carvings made since then, there has been a considerable relaxing of the orthodox method used to achieve accurate reproduction. This would normally involve the William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion technique of ‘pointing’, whereby exact measurements are made using callipers across a number of axes on the surface of the model which are then correlated across equivalent contours on the replication; it would usually be standard practice for the translation of a clay model into stone.

But John Maine had repeatedly urged students to attempt some direct carving, obviously not without a basic sense of the form and character they were looking to prioritise, but without feeling the need to have reduced, in advance, every detail and proportion to a fixed, measured value. Initially, this might have seemed like a heresy to the students and certainly a ‘risk’ too far, but gradually, its potential benefits had begun to be apparent. In the most palpable sense, Gary had set the precedent by improvising his way through the difficulties already described, but his example had been reinforced at the same time by Raja Sekaran, our Indian carver, who had seemed to produce his elephant almost straight from the block with little, either in the way of preliminary modelling or subsequent recourse to corrective measures. The Sculptural tradition from which he had emerged was, of course, different from its Western counterpart in many ways but not least to the extent that direct carving was neither unusual nor daunting to him. It would have been wrong, however, to see Raja as a special case whose training and background placed him outside our new frame of reference. The whole point of his being in the School was to help expand the students’ awareness of what was possible (which was why we had also sent students on Summer placements to Raja’s own workshop in India). He had absorbed the conventions and the symbolism of his own tradition since boyhood and it was by way of his instinctive confidence as a mediator

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of traditional forms that we came as close as we reasonably might to some equivalent of the mediaeval bestiary.

His elephant was the first of what I think of as the ‘exotics’ that I’d hoped might be produced by our multicultural atelier as each carver tried to reconcile potentially conflicting obligations – to his or her own formative history, to the spirit of the collective project and to the mediaeval aesthetic of St George’s Chapel.

At a material level, these adjustments of attitude, both to the prospect of direct carving and more generally to reproductive techniques based on exact measurement, were considerably facilitated by the particular properties we discovered in Syreford stone. It was supplied to us by Martin Ashley in his capacity as overall advisor to the Chapel’s architectural refurbishment, and it was a revelation. In its colour and texture it was, of all quarried stone available, that which most closely resembled the original. It proved to be very easy to carve – rather too easy was one’s first fear since the longevity of the new carvings was obviously an important concern and excessive softness seemed unlikely to serve that end. Fortunately, its surface, when finalised, also hardens progressively with exposure to the atmosphere making it perfect for our purpose. With these attributes in mind it was certainly easier to consider a direct or more improvisatory approach; prospective ‘errors’ would be more amenable to ‘correction’ or rethinking and the unexpected was to be looked for with excitement rather than fear. We realised also that the length of the oblong blocks as they were quarried was generous enough to allow second attempts at their opposite end if the first effort needed radical alteration! There would still be enough length behind the carving for it to key securely into the wall cavity.

As the working ambience became in the right sense more relaxed - i.e. good humoured and interactive without any loss of focus - I think the project became more evidently a group endeavour and in its successes a collective achievement. The individual’s good idea and the example set could be a foil or a reference for others, and the group as a whole, more than the sum of its parts. The process whereby the Sculpture committee would decide which models should be progressed into stone and which should not had become less of a one-off arbitration and more a discursive and extended negotiation. Things were going well, and the third of what proved to be our first trio of approved carvings emerged as distinctive in its final form and character as each of the other two. Its maker, Ghislain Puget, had been a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris before joining the School as a Technician and working with students in both Fine Art Sculpture and Historic Carving. His education in Paris had, in fact, straddled these self-same subject areas, so he came equipped with rather more knowledge of the contemporary forms of Fine Art practice than was usual for our historic carvers. It is tempting, therefore, to see an interesting ‘conceptual’ conceit in the choice of a chameleon as subject matter. Like its ‘livemodel’, it conceals itself by matching its own appearance with that of its context, as it must being stone against stone. But more than this, its formal construction gives rise to a perceptual unravelling / reforming depending on the spectator’s viewpoint. This is important, since its aesthetic is essentially modernist, its faceted forms reminiscent of analytical cubism. The ability of this particular chameleon to play formal hide-and-seek is part of what reconciles the potential clash of a modernist aesthetic with that of a mediaeval context. At least, that was the theory! How it and its companion pieces would really look in situ remained to be seen.

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Chameleon

by Ghislain Puget

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Pelican

I wanted to embody something powerful, positive and timeless to adorn the Chapel; I chose a pelican and

by Graham Alborough

it’s chick to portray selfless devotion and unfettered maternal love. The pelican was a mythical bird in the mediaeval bestiaries, believed to have pecked its own breast to feed its young, and often represented in imagined carvings.

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The End of the Beginning The three completed carvings were presented to the Dean and Canons and other representatives of the Fabric Advisory Committee on the 2nd of May 2006. They were installed in the Dean’s Cloister on specially constructed ‘bankers’ (i.e. work tables) of more than usual height to allow for viewing from below – a small concession in the light of an otherwise unbridgeable gap between their eventual positions high on the Chapel wall and the level at which they had been carved. The Cloister is in itself an aesthetically beautiful place; its stone walls and floor are contoured and patinated to a gravitas that only historical time can confer. This ambience would seriously test the authority and stylistic compatibility of our carvings, but that was, after all, the challenge we’d ‘signed up’ for.

We had been required to install the work for appraisal at about 10.30 am by Canon White and his colleagues.

We allowed plenty of time and had arranged them in the sequence we preferred by about 9.15 am. The blocks are very heavy and were always difficult to raise to the level of the tall display bankers, not least because the capacity of the hydraulic lift available to us at that time stopped some way short of the requisite height! But all went well, no back injuries were sustained and, after due consideration, we felt pleased with what we had achieved.

The Cloister can be a cold place even in late Spring and especially in the early morning. There was, we knew, a café close by the castle that could provide the ‘full-English’ breakfast that we all thought was a good idea.

‘All’, on this occasion comprised Alan Lamb – the Head of Historic Carving, Hamish Horsley – a vital second in command, myself (Tony Carter) and the students who had actually produced the work, i.e. Gary, Raja and Ghislain. I remember that particular interlude and others like it on our visits to Windsor, with great pleasure.

There was a warm sense of camaraderie deriving from a job we felt had been well done both at the level of hands-on, blue-collar effort and of long-term creative achievement. This is not to say we were not nervous about the presentation that was to follow but we knew that as far as the carvings were concerned, we had probably done the best we could at that stage.

We were back in the cloister by 10.30 am and the appraisal took place in an atmosphere of goodwill and appreciation of the efforts the students had made. They, in their turn, spoke well about the experience they had been through, and the inquisitorial encounter of our worst imaginings in fact proved to be a benign and generous exchange of ideas, culminating in an unqualified approval for the three new grotesques.

The day of the installation was set for June 28th, 2006. It dawned bright and sunny and remained that way throughout. The above mentioned group of people, with the exception of Raja who was back in India, assembled again on the lawn below the Bray Chantry on whose façade the carvings were to be located. They were accompanied this time by students already working on the next group of carvings and by various interested supporters of the project. These included a representative from the British Council, Ms Dana Andrew, and from the Indian High Commission in London, the Minister for Culture, Dr Atul Khare. There were numerous friends of the carvers involved together with members of their respective families.

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The carvings were hoisted by crane and eased into the waiting cavities high on the wall. The dimensions proved all to be correct, the fitting straightforward despite lingering fears of snags at the last hurdle. By the time, later in the afternoon when the grouting had been done which restored continuity to the ‘string-course’, not even their newness could prevent our grotesques from looking entirely at home. No doubt, for those continuously involved in the refurbishment of ancient buildings, such events are commonplace and afford at best the gratifying sense of a job well done, but for those of us new to such things it was actually an emotionally moving experience albeit tinged with a sense of relief that we had been equal to the challenge. To contemplate the chapel that day with a clear blue sky showing all its external features to best advantage, was to fully experience the sense of privilege that anyone might feel who contributes to its continuing wellbeing. At the end of proceedings and as if to confer some authenticity on the intervention we had made, a large bird of prey drifted gracefully above the Bray Chantry where the new sculptures were located; it was a red-kite, unmistakeable and heraldic in its silhouette.

It seemed a good omen that this bird, once so common in the landscapes of mediaeval England both urban and rural but only recently emerged from near extinction in Britain, should have done so as a consequence of human intervention and nurturing in the valleys of Wales and the Chiltern Hills. This was surely a good way to mark the end of the first chapter.

We had, of course, nine more grotesques to produce, but what had been learned up to this point provided a new level of confidence within the group which augured well for the future of the project. In fact, we had already made good progress into the next stage, with four newly modelled figures well advanced in their respective characterisations: Our Japanese student, Tatsuya Kimata, was transposing what for him was the familiar symbol of a dragon, into the terms of our current project and doing it with some panache. Judith Tucker was working on a rather droll looking fish/human hybrid, humorously adapted from precedents in current popular culture. Ivan Cudby was modelling a snail which, even at an early stage had established a beautiful counterpoint between the smooth, linear geometry of the shell and the soft, adhesive texture of the body. And then there was ‘the wife of Bath’ as we came to know her. Tom Waugh, her originator into the terms of sculpture, had endowed her, initially, with breasts of ‘pneumatic’ proportions which, to everyone’s amusement, leaned provocatively on the lower part of the string-course. They subsequently deflated considerably, no doubt reflecting a temporary loss of nerve on Tom’s part, but after some further thought and encouragement from the group, they re-emerged, if not quite on the scale of the originals, well, at least restored to a fairly generous level of compromise. The feeling was that the good-wife’s ‘street-wisdom’ which is what her pose projected, nicely counter-balanced the affectation of piety that she contrived in a certain kind of fixed upward gaze. In this connection and equally significant in the later stages of her development was the addition of some decorative, vertical ‘ribbing’ on her dress which reached as high as her neck and shoulders. The effect of this detail was to emphasise her curves whilst by implication concealing her flesh; it further consolidated a mutual accommodation between the degree of decorum that the context seemed to require and the carnal suggestiveness that adds greatly to her interest…

At that point of progression, we knew that there were many more than twelve grotesques requiring replacement

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Dragon

by Tatsuya Kimata

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Coelacanth

by Alice Green I just happened to read about the astounding modern re-discovery of a certain fish thought, from fossil records, to have become extinct 65 million years ago. This story caused a world wide sensation at the time, akin to finding a living dinosaur...I had a powerful dream about this fish one night and decided to try modelling it in clay.

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and we were looking forward to what we hoped might be a long alliance between the School and Windsor. But for a while, there would be time and, if there was indeed the prospect of a continuing association, there would be the need for more reflection on all the complex implications of what is at stake in restoring or conserving the fabric and/or the spirit of an ancient building. How might we refine the pretext for our intervention to best suit that purpose? And how could we stimulate our imaginative relationship to the task? We needed to add another dimension of awareness to what we were doing, and to establish a frame of reference in which metaphor would play its part as an inspirational stimulus. So, where are we now?

All twelve carvings constituting the original commission were approved by the FAC. At the last count and over a period of nine years, students from the department of Historic Carving at City & Guilds of London Art School have produced forty new grotesques for St George’s; six of these are already positioned on the lower stringcourse of the Bray Chantry and randomly on the Chapel’s West front; another ten are scheduled for installation in the Autumn of this year and the rest are in storage at Windsor awaiting the time when available funding can elevate them from obscurity to ‘consummation’!

These ‘grotesques’ as we still call them, are diverse in their subject matter not least because the establishing of a confident set of criteria and/or a conceptual model relevant to their function as ‘defenders of the sacred space’ has never really been assimilated into the project either in our own case or, as far as I’m aware, of any similar enterprise in other cathedral contexts. The problem facing us derives from the evidence that, historically, the carvings seem never to have conformed to any clear brief, beyond a tacit license to be strange, provocative – or grotesque! – which does not in itself quite support the idea of a defensive cordon. It is evident that neither in their original nor their present forms are they expected to be defenders in a military sense and, as the context of capitalist economics is not greatly sensitive to the notion of spiritual sanctity, so, the nature of their symbolism has been and remains necessarily oblique; in that sense, some of our carvings do, arguably, serve a protective purpose very well, but even then, as an expression born of instinct more than policy; fortunately, those which do not, are still objects whose aesthetic qualities and sensitivity to their mediaeval context make them very worthy additions to the continuing evolution of St George’s Chapel.

We are, however, still committed to establishing as a legacy of this opportunity, a frame of reference able to inform all such efforts at restoring symbolic meaning in the realm of the sacred, despite (or even reflective on) the politics and values of a largely secular society; despite the relentless materialism of these values some recourse to metaphysical precedent will be necessary to formulating a credible model, but that is part of the challenge. The act of faith demonstrated almost ten years ago by the Dean and Canons of the College of St George in instigating their alliance with a small independent Art School and with the visionary brief provided, deserves nothing less. The work goes on!

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Castle

My work is inspired by the Romanesque period. The idea is of the Church as a ‘home’, reflecting the solace

by Catherine Ladd Baldacchino

and sanctuary that it provides, both historically and contemporarily, spiritually and physically. The process was both daunting and exciting and initially I approached the final carving of the piece quite tentatively.

This was until I realised that it would never get finished if I didn’t adopt a more confident method of carving.

25

Cobra

by Louis Francis

43

My concept for the Windsor Grotesque design was originally purely sculptural. The ideas and meanings of

Owl

the owl design came after, its modern associations with wisdom and learning, and its mediaeval associations

by Ruby Sumner

with secrecy and evil. I intended to show the owl in its natural, organic state, of a free, wild animal, which has fascinated human kind for centuries.

The Dean in his foreword has already mentioned that the College of St George is committed to the protection and conservation of the significant sculpture that is an integral part of St George’s Chapel. In 2011, the Dean and Canons of Windsor established a Sculpture Fund to enable St George’s both to create and conserve, and thereby ensure St George’s Chapel’s wonderful legacy for future generations.

The remarkable grotesques that you have seen in this exhibition have been made possible through the generous support of benefactors to the Sculpture Fund and the Dean and Canons would like to take this opportunity to thank all those that have enabled this work to take place.

Should you wish to support this innovative, exciting project as part of the overall renewal of St George’s Chapel, please contact our Development Team on +44 (0)1753 848885 or email sculpturefund@stgeorges-windsor.org.

Your contribution will significantly enhance the restoration of this building, secure its future and encourage the development of the fine craft skills of many young people.

Thank you for your interest and valued support.

PHOTO CREDITS

David Clare, Doug Harding, John Harris, Charlotte Manley, Martin Ashley Architects, City & Guilds of London Art School Exhibition Video by Harris Digital Exhibition and Catalogue designed by Exposed Design Consultants

©2014 The Dean & Canons of Windsor

The Foundation of the College of St George The Cloisters, Windsor Castle, SL4 1NJ www.stgeorges-windsor.org Registered Charity no. 1118295

City & Guilds of London Art School 124 Kennington Park Road, London SE11 4DJ www.cityandguildsartschool.ac.uk Registered Charity no. 1144708