Giles Kent @ Broomhill

The Artist Speaks

In The Garden of Gaia

Born in 1967, the sculptor Giles Kent now divides his time between his home and studio in south-east London and residencies in outdoor sculpture sites in England and abroad. Since graduating in Fine Art Sculpture at the University of East London, Kent has enjoyed residencies and sculpture commissions for gardens and woodlands in many English counties, and also in Sweden and the Czech Republic.

To encounter a sculpture by Kent on a gentle sylvan saunter or a more arduous trek through primeval-seeming undergrowth is to be stopped in one's tracks in awed surprise, to be rooted to the spot at the sheer surreality of what's on view. He claims that even animals sometimes react like that; startled deer having been known to sniff with peculiar curiosity around his transfigured trees. So far he has made sculptures out of beech, sycamore, larch, lime, sallow, maple, oak, pine, cypress, Lebanese cedar, spruce, alder, yew and chestnut. He says "it's practical and fulfilling to work with dead standing trees, recycling something that's dead. It's also just so good to work in the place where the tree itself has grown."

The forms he makes are often intimated by the types of tree. Oak guarantees durability and longevity: his works in oak often look tough and squat. A recent sculpture in sallow, though definitely solid, has the appearance of three tall, delicate, translucent ascending waves. He says, "I like working in pines, because I like that soaring straightness, and I like the pine environment- with all those straight lines to work with." The other noticeable difference he finds between different woods is their colour. "On the whole my work is about experiencing wood's inherent qualities," he says, "interacting with its forms, creating space in and around it and relating the work to the surrounding landscape and its presence. The materials and sites I choose enable me to try and express feelings of growth, balance, freedom and truth that I look for in myself and which I perceive to exist in nature."

At college, Kent experimented with whittling wood, and also meticulously carpentering various bits of tree together. But he eventually learnt that he prefers what he calls "the directness of one whole tree". The beauty and precision of natural forms are qualities Kent's sculpture strongly evokes; only recently he came across a 1928 book of photographs of flowers, buds and seeds in close-up against stark neutral backgrounds, by Karl Blossfeldt, which he says has been "endless inspiration". Though he sometimes makes sketches and drawings beforehand, he says that, more often than not, he has "not so much an idea as a visual concept".

I have visited Kent during three of his sculpture residencies. At the Grizedale Forest sculpture park, 9,000 acres of wooded hillside in Cumbria - where not a single one of the dozens of sculptures on view is in sight of another- one of Kent's most singular works emerges literally out of a small mountain lake. It consists of nine carved Sitka Spruce trunks, the tallest of which is fifteen feet out of the water, all poised at different heights in a gracefully asymmetrical grouping. In the sunlight they first appeared to me like nine luminous double-pointed pencils or glistening blades piercing both the sky and (via an almost pristine reflection) the water).

All of the trunks have been hollowed out twice. "The visual qualities of nature lie in simplicity and repetition," says Kent. "I try to keep it very simple, repeating forms, trying to work with the lines and shapes around." The lake ensemble indeed demonstrates, simplicity and serenity too. It is imbued with wonderfully varied nuances.

"At college", Kent says, "I always liked the idea of an object floating in space, unattached to anything, just existing. Then I realized it wasn't going to be practical. It was then when I started taking photographs of my water-based sculptures, I saw that with the shape of the sculptures combined with the reflection, and the sky around it, it looked like there were these whole objects floating in blueness." Other Kent sculptures of this kind include six carved larch trunks (the tallest nine feet out of the water, meandering above and below the surface like some mysterious calligraphy) in a lake in the Czech Republic, and three sycamore trunks, the tallest four feet out of the water, carved in the form of tottering cones or vertebrae gone somewhat askew, in a Suffolk pond.

To visit the Gardens of Gaia in Kent at dusk, as I did, was to encounter a group of seven Scots pines which formed a kind of magic lantern show. Each tree had been carved in multiple alternated sections, so that a reasonably regular segment of bark (pierced by a square hole all the way through the trunk) was followed by a segment severely sawn right down to the bone, so to speak, or to the bare, pale, rounded wood. These slender forty-feet-high trees- each with as many as fifty regularly alternating segments- glowed with a literally inner light, as the descending sun pierced their cores.

Elsewhere at Gaia, nine giant top ends of stripped Scots pine had been wedged firmly in place by Kent at intervals in the upper reaches of a tangled beech coppice, like so many giant arrows of gold caught in impossibly dense, dark, entangled thickets- a beautiful and lucid arrangement in the unspoilt woods.

For the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden in Surrey, Kent created in his studio two sculptural groups, each composed of three figures. Three lime trunks, the tallest six feet, have been carved into the oddest sinuous and orbic forms: bulbous at the top, with what appear almost like folds of skin lapping underneath with, at root, powerful bases, like heavy truncated thighs. Roots, bulbs, scrotums, penises, vulvas, flowers, foliage and the human body: this sculpted trio suggests all these things (and more) simultaneously. Their core subject, like that of all Kent's sculpture, appears to be amazing fertility of both nature and the human imagination, and a timeless stillness beyond.

Philip Vann - Resurgence No. 203 November/ December 2000. Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Economist.

Selected Exhibitions and Commissions

1996
Graduate from University of East London with B. A. Hons in Fine Art - Residency, Grizedale Forest, Cumbria - Residency, Eye Town Moors Woodland, Suffolk.

1997
Sculpture trail in private woodland, Lincolnshire - Royal Society of British Sculptors Membership Bursary - Residency, The Gardens of Gaia, Kent - International Wood Sculpture Symposium, Czech Republic - Commission, Norbury Country Park, Surrey.

1998
Commissions, Burghley Sculpture Garden, Lincolnshire - Commission, private collection, Cotswolds - Residency, Akerby Sculpture Park, Sweden - Commission, Capstone Farm Country Park, Kent - Commission, private collection, Cotswolds.

1999
Residency, Broomhill Art Hotel Sculpture Garden, Devon - Residency, Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, Surrey - Commission, private collection, Cotswolds - Additions to Sculpture trail in private woodland, Lincolnshire - Commission, Downham woodland walk, London.

2000
Commission, Albury, Surrey - Residency, Tatton Park, Cheshire - Commission, River Lune Park, Lancaster - Commission, private collection, North London - Additions to Sculpture trail in private woodland, Lincolnshire.

2001
Commission, Burghley Sculpture Gardens, Lincolnshire - Addition to Sculpture trail in private woodland, Lincolnshire - Group exhibition, Harold Hilliers Arboretum, Hampshire - Group exhibition, Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh - Group exhibition, Royal Society of British Sculptors, London.

2002
Solo exhibition, Royal Society of British Sculptors, London - Commission, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada - Mark Tanner Sculpture Award - Commission, private collection, Wiltshire - Commission, private collection, Scotland.

2003
Start exhibiting work at the Pride of the Valley Sculpture Park, Surrey - Commission, Farnborough Hospital, Kent - Commission, private collection, West Sussex - Mixed Exhibition, The Gallery Cork Street, London - Solo Exhibition, Standpoint Gallery, Hoxton, London.