“Always in my mind is the desire to describe the landscape of the human body and the country,” says Artist Wycliffe StutchburyWhose elegant compositions are closely linked to nature and a sense of place. He creates handmade wooden shingles made from various sources such as bog oak, holly and ash, where the pieces are arranged in elementary compositions.
“I work with wood because it is full of surprises, and it is a wonderful material,” Stutchbury tells Colossal. “The character, texture, vulnerability, robustness and the way in which it registers the passage of time … I really see myself as an editor of nature.”
The artist is fascinated by the human relationship with the landscape, or what he describes as “the struggle between our desire to lay shape on the natural world and his unwillingness to conform.” It doesn’t matter how we try to manipulate, use or suppress the natural environment, it always forms our efforts.
Stutchbury was formally trained as a furniture maker and when he graduated from the university, he focused on making what he calls ‘miniature reality’, or very precise models of everyday things that he exhibited in large, white spaces. After the university he moved to a studio with some colleague graduates. The artist realized that he had to put the nose on the grindstone and started withdrawing to woodworking.
“One day I walked home and the neighbor’s house became confused again,” says the artist. “The builders had left the old roof layers in the front garden and I asked if I could take them away. The rain and sun and time had produced these beautiful colors on the wood. “
With his mind still in ‘miniature fashion’, Stutchbury comes for a small tile roof and a texture wall panel dressed with small shingles came to the fore. The rest is history, as they say. In the course of time he experimented with different types of foeraged wood, with larger panels, multi -part installations, carpet -like wall rugs and, most recently, architectural interventions.
His project ‘The Craig’, a title derived from the Gaelian word for rock, interprets the outdoor covering of a 17th-century stone barn in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. According to the contours of the original brickwork and the covered aisle through the middle, Stutchbury brought hundreds of shingles in a subtle wavy pattern.
The artist applied material for “The Craig” exclusively from fallen branches in the adjacent forests. “The title for every work is delivered by the location that the wood is found,” he says. “I am looking for cases and forgotten wood, and how it responded to its environment and surroundings offers me the platform to work from.”
Stutchbury follows where the work brings him. “Although I aim to apply my own structure to these works through concentration and technical skills, I fail,” he says, adding to it:
I make mistakes, my concentration wanders, I change thoughts, (s) I can’t keep a straight line or a perfect atmosphere. I notice that I am being drawn to an intuitive way of working, such as stacking firewood. So I allow the wood that I have for me, points the way, and through a process of editing I try to reveal the qualities and the story in it.
The artist has been busy with committees, including a trip to Maine in May – a region rich in the architecture in gravel style – where he will held a height of a house on the coast. Discover more about the artist website.
