DURING THE SUMMER OF 1999 I met that extraordinary sculptor, and extraordinary man, Laurence Edwards. I met Laurence in Suffolk when he and the American caster Coral Lambert organised an Anglo-American iron-sculpture workshop in his studio at Yew tree farm near Laxfield. Recently, Laurence talked about the movement of bronze and the coincidences and contacts within the sculpture world. To sculptor-bronze casters heritage, history and connections are important features of their lives. The caster is always aware of links to the past, the history of the craft and the lives of long- dead artisans.
Laurence Edwards and I trained in the Foundry in the Sculpture School of the Royal College of Art. It was then housed in an old cavalry building in South Kensington said to be designed by I. K. Brunel. Laurence and I represent different generations of foundry students. He studied under the Ceylonese Master Founder Tissa Ranassinghe. Tissa succeeded Maestro Alberto Angeloni (Bert) who also taught me. Each was appointed by Bernard Meadows who was then Professor of Sculpture.
Bert Angeloni did not reveal when he came to London from Italy, but it was during his childhood. He was one of a family and a tradition within the Roman statuary bronze casting industry. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Duveen commissioned the sculptor Alfred Gilbert to bring back from Italy a sufficient number of artisans to set up an Italian foundry in London. In this way, Lost-wax casting came to England. Up until then, British foundries (such as Singers of Froome) cast bronze statues using the industrial sand casting process. Led by a bronze-founder named Nelli, several Italian families settled in London and – being Italian and entrepreneurial – rapidly set up their own small foundries. The names Galicia, Furini, Fiorini, Angeloni, Mancini all entered Victorian London sculpture history. A side effect of this movement of skills and knowledge meant that caster sculptors like Laurence could own a direct link back to Italy, and the Rennaissance, through what he sees as an authentic oral history.
Bert Angeloni told me “You’ve go to make up your mind, son. Either you are a sculptor or a bronze-caster.”
Later, Eduardo Paolozzi gave the same advice to Laurence. In fact, this remark was already out of date; there were artists (a tiny minority it is true) who managed to be both. But, generally, Bert’s observation was correct. The artist who concentrates all his time and energy on building up a business making castings for other sculptors does not have the time or energy to make his own works.
The conventional trade reproduces an artist’s work by taking a flexible mould from the original clay or plaster and then making a wax replica in the mould. A core of refractory material is poured into the wax and then it is invested (meaning coated) with more refractory until a strong mould is built up. Before investment, the core is connected to the mould by iron pins. The wax is then melted out in a kiln (hence ‘lost wax’). But melting is not enough, wax gas must be driven out of the mould. To achieve this, the mould temperature has to be raised to red-heat (about 750 degrees).
In 2002, not long after I met him inland at Laxfield, Laurence moved his studio to the fenland, Butley Mills on the estuary of the Ore. This is the Suffolk coast, a different landscape and atmosphere to the farming area inland. His work was soon deeply influenced by this ancient landscape, full of Saxon burials and bronze age hoards. Demand began to grow for his sculptures, meaning he could let go of the commercial casting, his sculpture in effect had survived the challenges Angeloni had warned against.
Laurence brings the landscape into his sculptures both in the aesthetic and the literal sense. Lost-wax casting allows the introduction of organic elements. Bert Angeloni remarked that each Italian apprentice had to transform small creatures into his final casting, his graduation piece; frogs, mice, fish, birds went into the furnace. Many of Laurence’s sculptures show this clearly in the incorporation of twigs, leaves, and most common, reeds. Reeds became almost a symbol of the fenland to which Laurence moved.
Anything combustable will burn and disintegrate as ash provided oxygen can reach it. This is ensured by the ‘runners’ wax rods that become tubes, first to carry oxygen to the inside of the mould, and later conduct molten bronze to the mould-face. There are many examples of this in Laurence’s sculptures, large and small. A fine example is the crucifixion on the altar in Blythburgh church. The wax that bonds the reeds, twigs and other organic matter is ‘lost’ (melted out). The temperature in the kiln is increased, wax gas is expelled, and the organic matter transformed to ash. Clearly, a bronze sculpture formed in this way is unique. It cannot be reproduced or sold as an edition.
Laurence is native to Suffolk, and I first saw his bronze sculpture in East Anglia. The sculpture is irreversibly, mixed in my mind with grass, reeds and all the creatures of swampland. I followed the sculptures with fascination. I think, in particular, of the three ‘Creek Men’ – male figures placed on a raft outside the concert hall at Aldeburgh. The raft was moored in reeds and the figures rose and fell with the tide.
What is bronze? Bronze is an imprecise term for a family of copper alloys. Statuary bronze, also known as leaded gunmetal, commonly used in Europe consists of 85% copper, 5% tin, 5 % zinc and 5% lead. Bronze is both a versatile and a historic metal. Laurence enjoys the idea that there is a finite amount of bronze in existence, therefore all the lost bronze of civilisations is in circulation. However minute, molecules of Leonardo’s lost horse, the cannons of Carthage and a host of cultures past can all be present in the metal we use, it adds to the experience, and for me gives value to the material, my metal is art metal, culture metal, it is inhabited…full of ghosts, DNA, it can be thought of in many ways.”
This remark echoes the conclusions of a conference held in the Science Museum of the University of Oxford in September 1999. The conference concerned trade in copper alloys during the early Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. The conclusion of the conference was that the metal trade was more complex and far earlier than had been supposed. One of many speakers was Dr Peter Northover from the University Department of Archaeo-metallurgy.
Peter talked about an early bronze age hoard found buried in a valley in what was then Yugoslavia, close to the Italian border. It was assumed that the craftsman buried his mass of bronze fragments when he was escaping from one of the marauding war-parties that terrorised the region. He did not return to claim his stock-in-trade. Analysing the metal pieces, metallurgists discovered that the different alloys of bronze originated from a wide area of the Eastern Mediterranean. This was one of the examples that influenced the conclusions of the conference. Laurence too is fascinated by the origins and the mixing of the metal – ancient and modern. Bronze horards found close to his studio not only reinforced his attachment to the metal, but to the place.
Laurence uses the word ‘connect’ or connected’. I can see it in his work – connected in both time and landscape. The reed-men are connected through material; the reeds burnt off and the mud dusted away, but one can still trace the fen-land. That fine and intuitive sculptor, George Fullard, used to say, “Artists know that”. I did not understand what he meant while George was alive but, now, I can see it in Laurence’s sculpture:
“I watch as my figures are encased, suffocated, revealed, freed, converted into other materials, transmogrified, evaporated, cooked, lost, found, and lost again, ghosts of themselves returning to be ghosted again, destroyed, re-born and echoed eventually in a strange permanent state one revealing larger fields of association with history, deep time and lost culture. This list again is endless intellectually, and metaphorically, and it is in this list that I find my thinking is now nested.
Employing assistants has meant a degree of loss of direct contact with the process. My approach to casting now represents a new layer of thinking and is about moving on through a sense of continual loss of the physical connection to the figure, and of growth through makin,g and nurture in its cyclical reconstruction. I had similar feelings when I lost a landscape I relied upon. After a period of adjustment, I realised my idea of nature was in me and not the landscape at Butley, the reassignment of the source of my nature made me stronger, and so it is with my relationship to process. I think now about the figure’s metaphorical journey through the process and not the technical challenges.”
The method used in the majority of foundries in this country is reproductive lost-wax casting leading to an ‘Edition’, a number of castings. Both Laurence and I started our foundry careers casting the works of other sculptors in order to survive and feed our families. For neither of us was this an end in itself, each of us aimed to cast our own work. Laurence remarked that he made a rule (and kept to it) that he would include one of his moulds in each kiln-load of the work of others.
The influx of casting knowledge from Italy allowed sculptors to conceive of smaller scaled ‘backyard’ foundries. It was fortuitous that the end of the 1939-45 war thrust a vast amount of war-surplus machinery and material onto the open market. Post-war casters bought army cookers, which cost very little. These operated on the Primus-stove principal using pressurised, vaporised paraffin with the business-end of a weed-burner connected to the cooker and placed in the furnace Tuir. This also worked in the kiln entrance. Paraffin was superseded by bottled-gas. During the fifties and sixties there developed a society, almost like a cult, of men, and a few women, who made their own castings. It is interesting that technology interacted between poor artisans in former colonial countries and artists (also poor) in the former metropolitan centre.
Coming from the same tradition of bronze-casting it is no surprise that we have a fascination with the process and experimentation with materials – Laurence calls it a “parallel journey”. Over lunch, my wife, Sylvie, asked Laurence about the difference of approach to a sculpture between casting it himself and employing others to do the casting. A few days later Laurence replied: “My approach to the process has evolved over time. When I was in touch with it, so to speak, I made decisions of a practical nature, what feather to leave, what runner stub to expose, indeed what runner system to leave intact, pouring cup, core pins, whether to patinate, what grind marks and welds complimented modelling, the list is endless. I’m now removed from that, I can only go so far in instructing people what are subjective and spontaneous decisions.
Now my focus is on my subject, since the modelling of a prone figure, when I was surprised by a sense of empathy, surprised by feelings for what became a patient rather than a sculpture, I began to feel more connectivity to the figure. Now the process is a series of actions that affect me emotionally.”
Laurence spoke about the sculpture ‘dominating’ the artist or taking over his thoughts. I know what he means from personal experience, the sculpture taking control; that sense of the implacable nature of a sculpture – the artist hitting an impasse. One of many things that makes Laurence exceptional is moving forward. He does not rest on his laurels, nor does he make ‘safe’ objects.
An outstanding example is the forming and casting of ‘Yoxman’. In 2016, Laurence moved from Butley to Halesworth. I visited the new, much larger foundry at Halesworth and watched Laurence, Tom Crompton and the foundry team, constructing parts of the wax and investing the sections that would eventually become the colossal figure ‘Yoxman’. I planned on seeing more of construction and casting as it went forward but any plans for travel were disrupted by Covid. ‘Yoxman’ is the 26ft high colossus which overlooks the A12 in East Suffolk. It is a massive 50 sectioned piece of casting with a complicated internal stainless steel structure. It took four years to complete and demanded the casting expertise and engineering knowledge of Laurence’s foundry manager Tom Crompton. Tom also planned and supervised the expansion and rebuilding of the foundry in the process.
One of many attractions of lost-wax casting is its origins. Variants appeared all over the world. In Beijing two very old lady Archeo-metalurgists debated which of two bronze casting techniques came first – piece-moulding that grew out of the Ceramic craft, or lost-wax.
No one can be certain of the answer, the origin or the date. Laurence and I share a fascination with its origins. Laurence was granted an INTACH Travelling scholarship, to travel the Indian Subcontinent to study traditional methods of casting, over two years he worked in ancient foundry’s from Tamil Nadu in the South, to Bengal and as far north as Nepal and I was sponsored jointly by the Schumacher organisation and Royal Dutch Shell to study the West African method in Cameroon. Like Laurence, I also studied the Newar casters in Nepal.
It is important to emphasise that Laurence is inspired, not just by the process, or by the pre-history of forming and casting, but by the landscapes in which the discovery and evolving of casting happened. The Hitites, the Celts, the Chinese, the historic Asians and West African casters made their art with simple basic materials and the most primitive of tools. They lacked the mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry and computer technology available to sculptor casters today, and yet no one would assert that their work is inferior to ours. What makes Laurence’s art unique is his awareness and sensitivity to pre- history. The prehistoric landscape of East Anglia that formed that culture is deeply imbedded in his sculpture.
Steve Hurst
