THE LIFE OF A PUBLIC SCULPTURE,
FROM INCEPTION TO APPRECIATION
17.00 (BST) / 12.00 (EDT)
THURSDAY 19 OCTOBER 2023
How do artists respond to a commission, assess the display location and how sculptures will look depending on their size?
The webinar will try to respond to these questions, exploring also the commissioning side of sculptural projects and discussing some of the finest examples of public sculpture.
Join our panelists Abby Hignell, founder of Hignell Gallery, Melissa Hamnett, Director of Heritage Collections and Chief Curator at UK Parliament, and Claire Mander, founder of theCoLAB, who will be in conversation with contemporary sculptor Nic Fiddian-Green (Sladmore Gallery).
Recording now available to view!
After studying history of art and working in both auction houses and commercial galleries, Abby Hignell founded Hignell Gallery in 2015 which specialises in contemporary British sculpture. Public sculpture projects have included Helaine Blumenfeld's carved marble Tempesta for The Lancasters, Hyde Park, and Sophie Ryder's Minotaur and Hare on a Bench for London's newest public park at Wood Wharf.
Melissa is Director of Heritage Collections and Chief Curator at UK Parliament, where she is responsible for the research, management and strategic direction of the Parliamentary Art Collection, the Historic Furniture and Decorative Arts Collection and the Architectural Collection. Prior to coming to Parliament, Melissa worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2004-2019 where latterly she was Curator of Sculpture 1850 to the Present. She has spoken and published on 19th- and 20th-century sculpture and architecture, including the New Sculpture and British sculpture after Rodin. She has advised on public sculpture projects in the UK and abroad, worked on multiple contemporary commissions and exhibitions, and sits on the advisory board of an AHRC-funded sculpture project 'Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul's Cathedral c.1795-1918'. She is a Trustee of the Decorative Arts Society and Chair of the PSSA Marsh Awards for Excellence in Public Sculpture.
Claire Mander is founder and curator of theCoLAB which commissions sculptors to realise works in the landscape or unconventional spaces. In 2021, she transformed a neglected half-acre roof terrace on top of Temple tube station overlooking the Thames into the Artist's Garden, a sculpture garden for the work of women artists. She has realised landscape art commissions across the 100 miles of Morecambe Bay and showed the work of 17 Nordic sculptors across London. She also runs Body and Place annual landscape drawing residency. She is Board Member of the National Festival of Making, Blackburn, sits on the Westminster City of Sculpture panel and former Trustee/Chair for UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC).
Born in Hampshire in 1963, after leaving school Nic Fiddian-Green took a one-year foundation course at Chelsea college of art in 1982. Engrossed in the horse as a subject, he was greatly moved by the power, skill and beauty of the Parthenon frieze and the Selene horse after first seeing the work in the British Museum. From 1983-1986 Nic attended Wimbledon college of Arts and further began to develop his interest in the equine subject and its creative potential. The year after graduating from Wimbledon, he enrolled on a bronze casting course at Central St Martin's and he proceeded to cast his sculpture.
Nic Fiddian-Green has had many successful exhibitions both here and abroad in the many years the Sladmore has represented him, and it is evident that he still has an authentic affinity with the nineteenth and twentieth century masters also exhibited by the gallery - from Barye, Mene or Bonheur, to Bugatti, Degas and Frink.
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