Summer Sculpture Show
New work by Richard Aumonier, Muirne Kate Dinean, Leonie Gibbs, Jonathan Loxley, John Taylor, Jilly Sutton, Paul Vanstone

4th May to 21st June, 2008
Opening Times: Fridays, Saturdays, Mondays 11am to 5pm. Other days including Sundays and Evenings by Appointment.
		click images to enlarge
The beautiful gardens and landscape surrounding West Sussex's Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, provide an idyllic setting for one of the most exciting outdoor sculpture shows this summer.  Between 4 May and 21 June 2008 new works by such distinguished sculptors as Richard Aumonier, Leonie Gibbs, Jonathan Loxley, John Taylor, Jilly Sutton and Paul Vanstone will be on show to the public for the first time.
Leonie Gibbs' the Pictish Queen, has been specially cast for the exhibition. Standing five feet tall, the bronze figure draws on Gibb's Scottish background and fascination with ancient Highland history. Robustly modeled, She strides confidently forward the wind catching her swirling skirts behind her.
Paul Vanstone's new series of work includes pieces heavily influenced by his detailed study of drapery in a wide range of coloured marbles gathered from countries as far afield as India and Italy. He has introduced architectural elements into some of the work and in many cases almost eliminated the form beneath the drapery surface. Two major pieces are a pair of large scale heads in a fleshy, pink, Portuguese marble.
Jilly Sutton is well known for her large wood carvings, mainly heads and figures formed from a single tree trunk. Her recent portrait of the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. Wood is a living breathing medium and her work reflects an intimate knowledge of its properties and limitations. Limited edition castings taken from the original carvings are suitable for display outdoors.
Jonathan Loxley's geometric, carved stone pieces have an ethereal, timeless beauty in the perfection of their smoothly polished forms. For him the uncarved stone bears no predefined shape, his carvings come from his inner self, and he describes the stone he starts with as ‘a mirror that carves its shape and meaning from my own void'.
John Taylor has for many years lived and worked close to the marble quarries at Carrara in Tuscany. His delicately carved work in marble draws heavily on classical tradition. The three highly finished pieces for this show feature two sensuously interlocking figures.
Kate Dineen is the only woman to have mastered the ancient Indian art of 'araash' or Jaupuri fresco painting. She learnt the technique in India by studying under the last surviving master of the craft, the late Gyarsilal Varma. These simple sculptural forms are hung on walls and radiate with an intense lustre and colour. The technique is physically testing, brick dust, sand and lime are ground to form the base of the fresco, then over twenty layers of ground marble dust, slaked lime and pigment are built up into a block of solid colored stone. These layers are reground three times and the final nine layers burnished with an agate stone. Kate Dineen has collaborated with architects Will Alsop and Bijoy Jain at 'StudioMumbai' on site-specific installations in both London and India; she has worked with the High Street chain, Monsoon, and installed her frescoes in shops all over the world.
Richard Aumonier's work uses recycled off cuts from stone firms which are polished smooth and bonded with epoxy resin and then carved and polished into sensitive abstract forms. The resulting pieces have an organic, random layering like the sediment or strata in the landscape.
This exhibition runs concurrently with John HItchens: Evolving Boundaries a retrospective of his paintings.