ANGUS TAYLOR 

The Weight of Wings

31 August – 28 September | Everard Read at Leeu Estates

Everard Read Franschhoek is proud to present a new solo exhibition by Angus Taylor entitled The Weight of Wings.

To request the catalogue please click HERE.

Opening reception: Saturday 31st of August at 11AM

The Weight of Wings gathers twelve new bronze and stone figure sculptures by acclaimed sculptor Angus Taylor. Best known for his imaginatively conceived and audaciously executed sculptures combining various earth materials, Taylor’s new works in The Weight of Wings are the outcome of one year’s intensive labour in his Pretoria studio and foundry, Dionysus Sculpture Works. Classically modelled from steel armatures and successively built up in the round to their completed outward form, this new body of work reflects Taylor’s sincere commitment to artisanal work and respect for the histories and resistant qualities of his materials.

The bulk of the sculptures in The Weight of Wings is comprised of prototypical female figures variously augmented and/or encompassed by stone, including Belfast Gabbro, a fine-grained stone formed two billion years ago. These powerful female figures, at once mythical and totemic, stoic yet also unthreateningly heroic, variously embody conditions of pause, composure, protection, conveyance and transformation. Themes of metamorphosis and change are strongly prevalent throughout his female sculptures. It is strongly visualised in the Deduct series, a quadriptych of four smaller bronze figures gradually enveloped by raw labradorite stone crystals.

These geological icons flank the largest work on view, The Suspension of Self-Assertion, a larger-than-life resting male. He is a serene protagonist in the exhibition, irrefutably present but also absent; if anything, he is evocative of dreamers and dream states. Two hares, each executed with an observational clarity that recalls Albrecht Dürer, accompany this prone figure. A devotion to anatomical form and proportion is hallmark of Taylor’s sculpture, but it is not an ideology. Taylor shares in the poet Paul Valéry’s belief that “the work of art is always to some extent a disappointment to its author,” and that “perfection, to which the work is inadequate, lies beyond the work, not behind it.”

Taylor’s new works are strongly grounded in his reading interests in art, philosophy and psychology, notably his recent enthusiasms for the writings of Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana and British historian Peter Watson. Like Santayana, Taylor shares an interest in beauty and aesthetics, and is motivated by the desire “to learn to see in nature and to enshrine in the arts the typical forms of things.” And from Watson’s The Age of Nothing (2014) he draws inspiration from the assertion: “Art, like life, is an experience, an ‘intersubjective’ experience, not a monument. Like life, art is an encounter with the resistance of the world, and this is what the meaning of life is.”

Collectively, the new works in The Weight of Wings broadly extend on Taylor’s formal and conceptual investigations of the last few years into the figure, time and geology. The frequent juxtaposition of stone and bronze visually animates ideas about materiality and metaphor that strongly occupy Taylor as both maker and thinker. “The need to escape the life we have – to fly away to a world elsewhere, an alternative to the ‘here and now’ – is folly to my mind,” says Taylor. “We are mere seconds into the geological chronicle of earth.”

-Sean O’Toole

 ARTIST STATEMENT: 

I've been working on this pair of winged figures for nine months. As I’ve birthed them, I’ve wrestled with their titles. They have powerful, granite wings but paradoxically these ground the figures too.

During the making process, the figures have increasingly become conduits for my thinking - about our species and our place on this fragile planet. Their wings are freighted with meaning for me. Dreams of Lithic Levitation.

We are creatures of the earth and yet we yearn to fly - and fly we do. Our oleaginous collective carbon footprint is the result, and these figures with their heavy wings are, to my mind, sculptural metaphors for this.

The need to escape the life we have - to fly away to a world elsewhere, an alternative to the ‘here and now’ is folly to my mind. We are mere seconds into the geological chronicle of earth. But these seconds fill me with gratitude. I want to ‘fly’ deeper into an appreciation of the here and now, into the specific life that I am capable of living, into the marvelous and complex seconds that are mine. One way for me to do so, is to create.

Working with rock and stone is illuminating and the contextual understanding of its sense of deep time can be deeply grounding, pun intended.

Creating stacked sculptures remains core to my artistic practice.  Stacking stone is one of the oldest ways for humankind to build anything. Before we could carve or make objects, we piled stones on top of each other to mark a place of importance; to declare our existence.

Stacking wings, is a metaphor for the stacking of ideas and of comprehension. From a solid foundation, the layers slowly mount until, many layers later, you might create something stable and of significance, a material and mythological layering of stones and bronze.

These sculptures are not intended to evoke angels or other pre-existing winged figures, rather they connote the stacking of ideas and thought to arrive at wings, a metaphor for freedom. They are not mythical but a material reminder that we started with a heap of stones before we defied gravitational limitations and attained the freedom of flight, both literally and metaphorically.In preparing for this exhibition, I have worked on several sculptures simultaneously as I always do. It helps me achieve distance from the work and in so doing, it offers me windows of clarity as I make.

The Suspension of Self Assertion is a half-ton bronze figure, reclining on his side. Despite being four meters in length it is my hope that there is less monumentality and more humility about him, as he interacts with a much smaller creature. I chose the hare as a metaphor for vulnerability. I want this sculpture to advocate for a humble interaction with our natural world and a much-needed retraction of our domination over it.

Deduct Series is a new chapter in a practice I started many years ago. The stone I used is specific. In 2023 my partner Rina Stutzer and I visited a large stone exhibition of materials and technologies in Europe where I was stopped dead in my tracks by a blue shimmer emanating from a stone called Labradorite. After extensive research, I found the some of the best to be from Madagascar. It took months to land but with the help of my galleries and a long-standing patron, I secured a large quantity. I will work with the stone for many years and have begun the journey with a series of ‘deduct’ sculptures.

To make this series I have combined figurative elements of a bronze figure with abstract stone sections. When a number of these sculptures are viewed together, one is able to deduce the single figure. This series keeps the process creatively fresh as the alternating sections of bronze and stone create their own harmony and dialogue.

Demeter and Persephone are to me, Earth Goddesses, I titled them as I read The Road to Eleusis as I worked on them and found the Homeric hymn to Demeter very moving. They were the portraits of the winged figures and after they cracked (post molding) Over many months they gradually became the two goddesses, each with their own stone (earth) headdress.

She as the Poet and the Poet as Witness represents a strong female form. I wanted to the ‘anima’ strength that is different to animus. Female strength is an abiding source of fascination for me. The figure carries her strength, the layered earth, her soil horizons or chronicles of geological time.

 - Angus Taylor

Everard Read at Leeu Esates
Leeu Estates, Dassenberg Road, Franschhoek

Opening times: Tuesday - Sunday 10:00 - 17:00 
Contact us to make an appointment outside of these hours. 
https://everard-read.com/

erlgallery@everard.co.za
021 492 5980