In pictures: Walk this way to the sculpture park

We took a stroll around the summer sculpture park at Shaw House and picked out a few of our favourites from the 70-odd works for you, but do go along and discover your own – it’s free to enter and children and dogs are welcome.

Altered States outdoor sculpture exhibition at Shaw House, Newbury
until September 29

Review by LIN WILKINSON

Pictures by PHIL CANNINGS

MORE than 70 sculptures are in place on the Orangery Lawn at Newbury’s Shaw House, one of the country’s best preserved Elizabethan mansions, in this year’s Altered States, the popular annual open-air exhibition.

There are no conceptual surprises here – all the work follows long established genres and approaches - but there is much to enjoy, not least the high standard of craft. Most of the sculptors are showing two or three works, often working to the same theme throughout their pieces.

A pair of finely crafted stainless steel obelisks by Richard Heron, referencing ancient forms, greet visitors as they enter the exhibition. Stacey Beaumont’s abstract sculptures include Arcturus, an inverted triangle with a red glass inset: a pleasing combination of materials and colour. Peter Haynes’s ceramic vertical form, Standing Stone, has coloured insets and irregular incisions, which suggest palimpsests of ancient settlements.

Glen Farrelly shows three sculptures using storm-fallen tree limbs. Sunrise is blackened and incised, the artist’s interventions complementing the natural indentations; the shallow ‘rays’ in Message Detected suggest an ancient sensor.

Among the representational sculptors, Sarah Goodfellow’s marble ‘The Faintest Whiff’, has caught the exact moment a bear detects a scent on the wind. Her bronze ‘Watchful’ is a beautifully made cheetah head. Martin Duffy’s ‘Boxing Hares’ are irresistible subjects, but lack the vigour of Barry Flanagan’s 1970s trademark work.

Showing three works in Carrara marble, Lucy Unwin thus references the Classical world; ‘Flora’ can be read as a semi-abstracted female form or an opening flower. Tinei Mashaya’s collection of representational and abstract work includes ‘Abstract’, the purple veining of the lepidolite as important as the form.

Several works use individual leaf forms to create a composite. Bruce Garside’s Dancing Leaves 1 and 2 combine oak-leaf elements and liminal space in two very pleasing open forms. In his Acorn, the elements have been combined. In his corten steel installation ‘allen Leaves, Ian Gill has arranged individual leaf elements both on the ground and hanging from tree boughs above. The latter move with the wind, the sculpture thus combining the static and the kinetic.

In a group of oak columnar sculptures, exhibition curator Jim Crockatt has collaborated with several painters: Samantha Emmons, with whom he has worked before, but here also with Ricky Bellin in Sky Prison, with its wide sky-blue bands; with Mark Bijak in Hanging Out, a giant clothes peg with matching acrylic linear motifs (homage, surely, to Claes Oldenburg’s seminal work from the 1960s onwards); and, more decoratively, with Charlotte Crawford in Glittering Hallucinations.

Michael Haggiag works abstractly in steel with colour-printed surfaces: Wakefield combines a rectangle and cube in balance; Bahamas Colour contrasts mirrored stainless steel with colour. Christopher Pike’s DuOyst and DuOrb are constructed of small, blackened Douglas-fir triangle wedges diminishing in size from the central axis to create symmetrical spherical forms.

LIN WILKINSON

The show is open from 11-4 every day until Sunday 29 September. Free entry and car parking. Dogs and children welcome.