Laurence Edwards. Making Strange

About

A series of bronze heads entitled ‘Audience’ headline the show – diminutive portraits which grin, grimace and frown at the viewer with a disarming old world medieval charm. These visages are accompanied by a new series of running figures, an evolution of Edwards’s ‘Walking Men’ series. ‘Flight’ is a frieze of running men all looking anxiously over their shoulders as they flee a threat unknown, they run with a wary instinct, whatever lurks behind is not right and it is not good.

The rest of the exhibition in the main consists of larger heads, busts and stupefied figures reacting to and negotiating an unnerving world that continues to challenge and at times threaten. This includes new dissipated figures by Edwards, a further development which originated with Leaf Man (2010). By breaking up the visible surface of the body, these works reveal the nature of the cast itself, whilst also pointing to the act of looking, and to surfaces being only the visible aspect of a largely invisible whole: the body and what it contains.

These works will be accompanied by a series of prints showing Edwards’ engagement with the two-dimensional image in relation to his sculptural practice, and particularly his experimentation with etching.

The exhibition will be supported by a new publication reflecting Edwards’ studio practice and his ceaseless experimentation in two and three-dimensions. It takes the form of a half sketchbook featuring collaged pages full of drawings, images torn off workshop walls, photocopies of work in progress and photographs of the studio itself, offering a novel insight into the evolution of the work set out in the rest of the publication.