Barry Flanagan: Hare Coursed
New Art Centre, Roche Court, East Winterslow, Wiltshire
Showing sculpture outdoors not only offers the opportunity to see often large-scale works in a natural setting, but also tests the way highly-controlled and sophisticated art is able to command sufficient authority to compete with the undulating lawns and power of landscape. This is certainly a significant aspect of the New Art Centre, one of the most sensitive and thoughtful of sculpture parks and educational centres in the country.
It is set in the rolling Wiltshire wooded landscape, with Roche Court, a handsome traditional manor house, built nearly 200 years ago – a work in its own right – standing at the centre. Attached to the main building is a small, modern art gallery, which is currently showing etchings by Barry Flanagan. It is an ideal place to see and experience these linear works. At the back of the house is a specially designed and built artist’s house, intended to accommodate an artist-in-residence, but more often used for displaying art in a modern, minimal domestic setting. Again, it’s an ideal setting that is part domestic and part gallery.
On the table in the living room sits a small bronze, a few inches high, by Barry Flanagan, an artist who gained a reputation for depicting and capturing the naughtiness and energy of the running hare. In this sculpture, the animals are evoked rather than depicted in any straightforward way, but it captures the mystery of these intriguing creatures. Flanagan’s work, whether in metal or clay, has been characterised by a playful, almost inexhaustible inventiveness that has led him to question the nature and material of form and its medium. Inherent in these sculpture is boundless energy combined with a sense of humour – light-hearted, but astute.
Flanagan is best known for his dynamic, often monumental, bronze hares, creatures that are known for their cunning and bravery. The term “mad as a march hare” has become part of everyday language, suggesting a knowing eccentricity, while the animal is also strongly associated with the moon in its many phases and moods. Set in the park is the 30 feet tall piece Acrobats, which, like the hares that have been exhibited in other outdoor spaces, seems to have found a natural home, a witty, light-hearted response to the myths surrounding this rarely-seen creature. Lean and animated by gestures not quite belonging to animal form, the sculpture is as joyous as it is engaging, bursting with exuberant vitality.
In the centre of one of the lawns, a more modestly-sized bronze and steel sculpture by Flanagan offers a further response to the hare. On the top of a pyramidal form stands a leaping hare, caught forever in perpetual movement, capturing the speed and strength of this elusive creature.
Walking around the house and the park, visitors, equipped with a map, can identify and discover carefully-placed, large-scale sculptures, be they in ceramic, bronze, wood or metal, by artists that include Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Bill Woodrow, Barbara Hepworth and Richard Long. By contrast, there is also an installation of small ceramic pots by Edmund de Waal that creates a mysterious narrative and deceptively simple bowls by Rupert Spira that take on a monumental quality. All offer a diverse response to the idea and concept of what sculpture is today.
Emmanuel Cooper
The New Art Centre is open daily 11am-4pm
