Artworks

Galina Series 1973-80

In 1973 I had an epiphany while looking at Charles Sargeant Jagger’s great First World War Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. its powerful, narrative and humanistic content made me realise that in order to produce more significant work I required an infinite vocabulary of forms which the limitations of sheet metal did not allow.

As a result of this experience I change my entire method of working. I modelled my sculpture in clay and learned how to cast it into bronze. Galina I was the first in this new body of work. The rest of the series (Galina II to X) was made over the ensuing three years. Overall it represents a progression towards greater figuration, but all of the figures are treated formally. They are emotionally expressive and convey essential elements of the sitter with whom I had at the time an obsessive relationship. She was an excellent model with a high degree of body awareness with which she could transmit powerful emotional and sexual feeling.

This period of my work represents a search for a figurative language. The Galina Series was made concurrently with various other sculpture, such as Reclining Figure, Woman with Long Hair and Torso. They were all figurative sources which I developed towards a greater or lesser degree of formal abstraction.

Both subject matter and medium (modelling in clay, casting into bronze) were very unfashionable in the avant garde of that time and resulted in my being ostracised by my peers. I realised the risk I was taking but felt that I had no alternative. It led to a few very harsh years during which I could not get my new work accepted.

Gerald Laing