Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
8 September – 14 November 2014
Monday to Friday 5.30am-midnight
Saturday & Sunday 7am-11.30pm
canarywharf.com
@yourcanarywharf
Bridget McCrum was born in 1934. She studied at Farnham College
of Art and started carving seriously in 1980 when she had the time
and space to do so. She has had her work included in exhibitions
since 1984, with solo shows at Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London, in
galleries in Malta, and since 1998 at Messum’s, London. Her work
may be seen in many corporate and private collections, including
the University of Surrey; Prior’s Court School, Newbury; Lismore
Castle, County Waterford, Ireland; HSBC, Malta; Spencer Stuart,
London; Charter Bank, London; Golden Door Foundation, San Diego;
Bryher, Isles of Scilly; and Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, USA.
Books on her work include Touch and Time: The Sculpture and
Drawings of Bridget McCrum (2005) as well as a number of
exhibition catalogues and her work is discussed in The Art of Prior’s
Court School (2002).
McCrum is a member of the Royal West of England Academy, to
which she was elected in 2007. She is represented by Messum’s.
Canary Wharf is most grateful to Bridget McCrum
for working enthusiastically with us and to
Messum’s for assisting with this exhibition.
For more information visit www.bridgetmccrum.com
and www.messums.com
EVENT
Tuesday 28 October, from 6.30 to 7.15 pm
Curator Ann Elliott tours the exhibition with Bridget McCrum
The tour is free but please contact Canary Wharf Public Art Office
at [email protected] to reserve a place
Photographs courtesy of Messum’s unless otherwise credited.
Some of the works are for sale
Contact Canary Wharf Public Art Office for a price list
List of Works
Dimensions in
centimetres h ¥ w ¥ d
Birthday Bird 1996
Bronze
20.5 ¥ 27.5 ¥ 14.5
The Quarrier 2010
Bronze
45 ¥ 112 ¥ 70
Dog Resting 1950
Limewood
9.5 ¥ 9.5 ¥ 15.5
Bull and Bear
Maquette 1997
Bronze
18.5 ¥ 34.5 ¥ 23
Eclipse 2011
Bronze
105 ¥ 42 ¥ 17
Triptych of Cows 1988
Cornish Polyphant
stone
28 ¥ 31 ¥ 61
Algerian Sheep 1989
Bronze
72 ¥ 57 ¥ 115
Black Sheep 1989
Cornish Polyphant
stone
36 ¥ 40 ¥ 30
Cycladic Dove 1989
Ancaster stone
18 ¥ 17 ¥ 13
Cycladic Dove II 1990
Bronze
33 ¥ 51 ¥ 23
Wings c.1998
Carrara marble
53.5 ¥ 14 ¥ 6
Exaltation 1998
Bronze
78 ¥ 78 ¥ 23
Merlin 2011
Bronze
218 ¥ 95 ¥ 22
Bird of Time 2011
Kilkenny limestone
120 ¥ 156 ¥ 30
River Bird 2000
Bronze
54 ¥ 19.5 ¥ 14
Duck Weight 115 kg
2012
Kilkenny limestone
40 ¥ 51 ¥ 38
Hunting Bird 2001
Bronze
43 ¥ 100 ¥ 56
Chorus 2012
Bronze
21 ¥ 19 ¥ 8
Moon Bird 2002
Carrara marble
157 ¥ 40 ¥ 10
Etrusca 2014
Kilkenny limestone
82 ¥ 30 ¥ 31
Knife Birds 2004
Bronze
225 ¥ 145 ¥ 31
Private Collection
Etrusca 2014
Bronze
69 ¥ 24 ¥ 7
Small Cow 1990
Bronze
16 ¥ 32 ¥ 24
Test Piece for
Headstone 2006
Slate
10.4 ¥ 4.7 ¥ 17
Triptych of Cows 1990
Bronze
70 ¥ 145 ¥ 55
Nesting Bird 2007
Bronze
13.5 ¥ 29.5 ¥ 15
Gozo Goat 1991
Bronze
29 ¥ 36.5 ¥ 23
Colly Birds 2007
Bronze
18 ¥ 36 ¥ 38
Birthday Bird 1995
Clipsham stone
21 ¥ 29 ¥ 15
Nomad 2010
Bronze
52 ¥ 20 ¥ 10
Toscana 2014
Bronze
134 ¥ 94 ¥ 40
Scroll 2014
Kilkenny limestone and
Carrara marble
203 ¥ 64 ¥ 25
Granata 2014
Kilkenny limestone and
Carrara marble
45 ¥ 57 ¥ 30
Printed by Jamm Print & Production
Big Bird 1985
Cornish Polyphant
stone
25 ¥ 50 ¥ 60
Designed by Tim Harvey
lobby, one canada square
height through its position on a pyramidal mound. While
the form gives the impression of easy flight Merlin was
named for the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engine,
first run on 15th October 1933. The wing tip of the
sculpture apparently just brushes its pedestal because of
its hidden support. Merlin has its likeness in many of
McCrum’s drawings where her birds skim the sky and clip
the paper’s edge. However, her drawings are normally not
preparatory sketches for sculptures.
Some pieces in the exhibition have a more weighty
presence. Bird of Time 2011, Duck Weight 115 kg 2012
and the Kilkenny limestone version of Etrusca 2014 are
heavily earth-bound, resting. Duck Weight 115 kg was
based on actual weights shaped as birds and animals
made for weighing grain that McCrum had seen in a
museum in Damascus. These stone carvings give a more
benign character to birds through softer contours and
also generally being naturalistically shaped. McCrum has
developed in these pieces a way of adding drawing – she
terms it ‘scribble’ – through marks that she makes on the
surface of her sculptures using a power hammer, to indicate
a wing or an underbelly of a lighter tone. She employs
this way of working on both Kilkenny limestone and
Carrara marble as a form of signature to indicate that her
hand had made the sculpture. The same may be said about
her involvement in the patination of her bronzes where
she uses her painter’s sensibility for colour and texture.
In a relatively new stream of work, McCrum has
chosen to make supports for her sculptures integral to
the composition; Scroll 2014 and Granata 2014
exemplify this in different ways. The Kilkenny limestone
column of Scroll, on which a she has positioned a white
Carrara marble bird, is based on the idea of a carved
cylinder that long ago would have been used to print a
signature on parchment. The relief carvings of birds
against the textured
ground that she has
created on the
column throw them
into greater relief
and form a
decorative support
for the minimally
carved bird that sits
on top. In Granata,
the bird with head
turned back sits on
a pomegranate. McCrum had recently read Simon
Sebag Montefiore’s book Jerusalem: The Biography
(published 2011) in which he had written about a bird
on a pomegranate, which gave her the title for the
sculpture.
At eighty Bridget McCrum continues to refresh her
vision for sculpture, and in this year of her birthday, we
wish her many more years of happy creative productivity.
Ann Elliott July 2014
front Nomad 2010
Curated by Ann Elliott for Canary Wharf Group
containment, aggression, comfort, self-possession,
heaviness, lightness, resting and active.
A neighbour of McCrum’s had acquired Hunting Bird
2001 and later, when another neighbour wished to
purchase something similar, she decided to make The
Quarrier 2010. The contrast between the two hunters is
telling and very typical of birds of prey. Hunting Bird has
its wings down, making ready to descend, while The
Quarrier appears set to swoop on its victim. Both forms
are threatening, but one appears heavy, the other light.
The Quarrier, although initially commissioned, was made
into an edition that sold very quickly, a copy being
purchased by an American collector who has a fine group
of sculptures by British artists and who had, in 2005,
supported the publication of the first book to
appear on Bridget McCrum.
Knife Birds 2004 and Colly Birds 2007 show great
contrast in differing types of pairing. The two elements of
Knife Birds stand independently, confident, with heads
raised as if calling, whereas the two Colly Birds are
huddled closely. Colly, an Old English word for black,
refers to the common blackbird. One edition of Knife
Birds stands in the piazza of the University of Surrey. The
version in this exhibition has recently been acquired by a
collector to whom we are indebted for the loan of the
sculpture. Encouraged by the practice of the late William
Turnbull, whose Blade of Venus 1985 stands at the
centre of the ground floor in One Canada Square,
McCrum continued to take sources for her sculpture from
tools and artefacts of the past, as Turnbull had done with
great success in many of his bronze sculptures.
There are a number of upright slender forms of birds in
the exhibition in addition to Knife Birds – River Bird 2000,
Moon Bird 2002 and Eclipse 2011. Like Knife Birds, Moon
Bird and Eclipse take the similar form of tall, reaching
birds, their weight at the base of the sculptures keeping
them grounded. The white cool marble of Moon Bird
gives a ghostly presence whereas the darker bronze of
Eclipse absorbs the light, giving a different feeling to each
piece. All have parallels with the form of a curved blade.
Nomad 2010 is cast in bronze from an earlier marble
carving. Like others where she has employed this method,
the nature of the sculpture is altered. In this case the
bronze is warmer than the original Carrara marble, painterly
in its surface and somehow more Mediterranean in
feeling. The shape of the bird has slight anthropomorphic
overtones although its convex and concave curves are
taken from a Vietnamese agricultural knife. The portion of
the head and body McCrum has chosen to depict
resembles a bust, and stands proud.
Merlin 2011 exhibits both the movement and
lightness of the falcon in flight, and is one of McCrum’s
most feted sculptures, being commissioned by RollsRoyce for the site of its aero engine factory in Filton,
Bristol. There the sculpture, cast in solid stainless steel,
stands 4 metres high and is given an extra 2.5 metres of
Granata 2014
Sculpture by
Bridget McCrum
Polyphant stone, which she used to fashion Big Bird, is a
soap stone that is a good medium for carving, its dark
hues speckled with reds, browns and whites, and it is able
to take a lustrous polish. Installed since it was made in
McCrum’s garden on the bank of the Dart, Big Bird is
now further enhanced with lichens, which have not been
removed for the purpose of this exhibition. Here
McCrum’s carving is confident and robust, capturing the
contrary nature of a resting bird that remains alert, in
tension.
From the mid-1980s, McCrum produced many
sculptures experimenting with different British stones –
Ancaster, Clipsham and Bath – all of which are limestones
and therefore not too difficult to work; these were also
materials used by Henry Moore in his early carvings.
Algerian Sheep 1989, shown in this exhibition in bronze,
was first made in Bath stone. However, the sculpture
began to weather badly and decay so McCrum decided to
cast it in bronze in order to preserve the form. With a
small bird perched on its back, McCrum alludes to the
long collaboration between different species. The idea for
Algerian Sheep derived from a small pebble, curiously
shaped like a sheep with a single horn carved on its
surface, which McCrum had seen in a museum in Algiers.
This is one of the earliest pieces in which McCrum
combined her observations in nature with artefacts from
the past.
Having cast this stone sculpture in bronze, McCrum
has gone on to use the process again and again with her
carvings, not just to preserve the form, but also to make
pieces more readily available to a wider range of
collectors. By its nature carving is a one-off process but
bronzes can be editioned in numbers decided at the
outset by the artist.
Since the 1990s McCrum has employed Carrara
marble, the stone
favoured by
Michelangelo for its
white purity. The
earliest piece in the
exhibition is Wings
c.1998. The paired
wings stand upright
and when viewed
from some aspects
take on a conical
form. Interestingly,
the isolation of wings as an abstract form comes into
play again but on a large scale in Toscana 2014. Toscana
= Tuscany – the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. In
this sculpture the wings are evocative of blades, in
particular ancient ceremonial axe heads.
Most of the work in the exhibition is devoted to the
bird. Some are more abstract than others, but their
innate avian characteristics come through in a range of
interpretations, for example: sharpness, softness,
Algerian Sheep 1989
Past Present:
Thirty-five years elapsed between Bridget McCrum’s lime
wood carving, Dog Resting 1950 and Big Bird 1985,
which she carved in Cornish Polyphant stone. The period
in between marks a time when she was not actively
pursuing her career as a sculptor, but was building up to
the moment when she would be able to concentrate fully
on her art. McCrum married as a young woman in the
1950s after her art training, and accompanied her
husband, an Officer in the Royal Navy, on his extensive
travelling. She had no studio, but a vast interest in
everything that her travels had to offer. Their time spent
in the Mediterranean, based in Malta with visits to
countries in the Middle East, gave McCrum opportunities
to visit museums and sites of historic significance that
stimulated her interest and imagination. She looked hard
at Syrian, Egyptian, Coptic, Somalian and Algerian
artefacts and made drawings while bringing up her young
family, and when time allowed got involved in
archaeological explorations. The dry landscapes of Malta,
Syria and Egypt also captured her mind’s eye and were
recorded. The McCrums’ posting in Malta lasted some
eighteen months, but left a big impression on them and a
love of the area, to the extent that they acquired a home
on Gozo, which she still visits several times a year. On her
husband’s retirement in 1984 they settled in Devon, on
the banks of the River Dart, high above the water’s edge.
Here McCrum established her studio and began to
concentrate fully on making sculpture.
During the later interim years McCrum had begun to
refresh her art, taking courses in drawing, modelling and
stone carving and a short course in casting and patinating
bronze. Her diligence paid off, and in her new studio she
soon began to make
her mark as an artist
to be considered
seriously. She
developed a
personal vocabulary
of animal and bird
forms combined
with shapes of
ancient artefacts
that she had studied
in museums and
galleries across Europe and the Middle East. She was
drawn to pieces that featured economy of form and
textures worn over millennia. These, imbued with her love
of the natural world, have remained at the core of her
imagery.
Dog Resting, carved when she was just sixteen, shows
her extraordinary facility for gaining likeness and
character, which she has carried with her into more
abstract interpretations of animals and birds. Cornish
The Quarrier 2010
Sculpture at Work
Dog Resting 1950
Past Present:
Sculpture by Bridget McCrum