Our Artists’ Reflections on Landscape

For our flagship event, Sculpture in the Valley 2020, curator David Baldry has selected over 40 amazing artists whose work you can see on this page.

This year’s theme ‘Reflections on Landscape’ has been inspired by the 10 years of art and landscape work Waveney & Blyth Arts has delivered. We asked our artists to consider ideas of scale, perspectives and interaction between wild and cultivated aspects of the landscape. We are living in the context of climate crisis and this, along with broader perspectives on the landscapes we live in and our relationships with it were also suggested ideas to explore.

To see more of each artists’ work, click on their name to be sent to their W&BA profile page.

Elizabeth Cooke
Artist living in Suffolk, creating sculptures with welded steel and adornments. Her 2d work is mixed media.

“I am a sculptor who finds inspiration in the natural world. My work aims to extract the essence of a creature. I try not to create a realistic image, but rather to capture the feeling, movements and appearance of a bird, animal or insect. A moment in time in their life. One of my main themes this year has been herons – which I was going to pursue at Sculpture in the Valley.  I have created a heron sculpture from a Bewick print of a heron and another one based on Egyptian paintings of herons, I’ve still got a couple more in me!”

Gus Farnes
British artist whose work explores the human condition. In response to geopolitics, the concerns of our times, people movement, alienation, the environment, he sculpts figures using materials selected from his local area, then casts them in bronze.

‘Man with hands in pockets’ is a unique bronze standing at 2 meters tall. “The sculpture is a scaled 3d print of a much smaller pice, the surface modelled with wax and combustible organic material gathered from the marshland surrounding my studio. Once finished the sculpture is cut into sections, an investment mould built and each section placed in a kiln where the combustible material is burnt out leaving a void to be filled with molten bronze.”

Lisa Gates
Lisa is a student at Norwich University of the Arts where she is doing an MA in Fine Art, exploring the relationship between landscape photography and painting.

“This panoramic imagery responds to locations around the source of the river Waveney. Similarities found in photography and painting processes are explored when composing imagery. By developing compositional methods to promote and hinder visual perception, the aim is to enhance awareness of the environment and how we perceive it.”