“Always in my mind is the desire to describe the landscape of the human body and the country,” says artist Wycliffe Stutchbury, whose elegant compositions are intimately tied to nature and a way of place. He creates handmade wooden shingles produced from a variety of sources like lavatory oak, holly, and ash, arranging the items into elemental compositions.
“I work with wood because it is full of surprises, and it is a miraculous material,” Stutchbury tells Colossal. “Its character, texture, fragility, robustness, and the way in which it records the passing of time… I really just see myself as an editor of nature.”
The artist is fascinated by the human relationship with panorama, or what he describes as “the struggle between our desire to impose form on the natural world and its unwillingness to conform.” Irrespective of how we attempt to manipulate, use, or suppress the pure setting, it at all times shapes our efforts.
Stutchbury was formally skilled as a furnishings maker, and when he graduated from college, he centered on making what he calls “miniature realities,” or very exact fashions of on a regular basis issues, which he exhibited in massive, white areas. After college, he moved right into a studio with some fellow graduates. The artist realized he wanted to place the nostril to the grindstone and commenced to gravitate again to woodworking.
“One day, I was walking home and the neighbour’s house was being re-roofed,” the artist says. “The builders had left the old roofing battens in the front garden, and I asked if I could take them away. The rain and sun and time had produced these wonderful colours on the timber.”
Together with his thoughts nonetheless in “miniature mode,” Stutchbury imagined a small tiled roof, and a textural wall panel clad with little shingles emerged. The remainder is historical past, as they are saying. Over time, he experimented with several types of foraged wooden, making bigger panels, multi-piece installations, tapestry-like wall hangings and, most not too long ago, architectural interventions.
His mission “The Craig,” a title derived from the Gaelic phrase for rock, reinterprets the outside cladding of a Seventeenth-century stone barn in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. Following the contours of the unique stonework and the lined aisle by the middle, Stutchbury utilized tons of of shingles in a gently undulating sample.
The artist harvested materials for “The Craig” completely from fallen branches within the adjoining woods. “The title for each work is provided by the location that the timber is found,” he says. “I seek out fallen and forgotten wood, and how it has responded to its surroundings and environment provides me with the platform to work from.”
Stutchbury follows the place the work takes him. “Although I strive to apply my own structure to these works through concentration and technical skill, I fail,” he says, including:
I make errors, my focus wanders, I modify my thoughts, (and) I can’t preserve a straight line or an ideal sphere. I discover I’m being pulled towards an intuitive manner of working, like stacking firewood. So, I enable the timber I’ve earlier than me to cleared the path, and thru a strategy of enhancing, I attempt to reveal the qualities and narrative held inside it.
The artist has been busy with commissions, together with a visit in Could to Maine—a area wealthy with Shingle Fashion structure—the place he’ll clad one elevation of a home on the coast. Discover extra on the artist’s web site.
