Flowers Gallery | Michael Sandle

Not seen as being at the forefront of the avant-garde but one of those artists who has offered us a much valued transatlantic antidote to Kiefer’s Germanic version of the anti-memorial; though of course Sandle RA did teach in Germany for a period.

Understated (perhaps under-rated), a ‘sculptor’s sculptor’ – knows the business; form, scale, size, material, contraposto et al. Objective/monumental as opposed to illusionistic/impressionistic.

 ©Michael Sandle: Encapsulated Submarine 2011. Flowers Gallery, London.

ego geometria sum | Helen Chadwick

I was talking to ex-Chelsea stalwart Trevor Sutton a couple of weeks ago about our shared memories of Chelsea School of Art c.1984: I recalled this rather intense and somewhat exasperated woman being directed to me as someone who might help her. I remember she was infuriated with both plywood and ‘liquid light’ as intractable, uncooperative materials. I gave her a bit of a hand with what turned out to be part of ‘ego geometria sum’. Lots written about this corpus of work – pun intended – but as they emerged I recall that they were delightfully awkward and not a little odd. One of the first women nominated for the Turner Prize, sorely missed, we miss too what might have been. Helen Chadwick.

©Helen Chadwick, ‘ego geometria sum’ 1983-86