Carol Peace Sculpture
For almost 30 years, Yorkshire-born sculptor Carol Peace has tried to capture “everyday life, in its minutia, the sheer fantasticalness of it all” in clay, bronze and iron resin.
The results are human forms that express the “extraordinariness and magnitude of the simplicity of the touch of a partner, the closeness of love”, which have been described as “enduringly popular”.
At the Prince’s Drawing School
After graduating in 1992 from the Winchester School of Art, Carol Peace set up a studio at Spike Island, Bristol, before going on to study drawing at Prince's Drawing School in London, now known as the Royal Drawing School.
Another Bristol studio followed, this time at Paintworks, while she exhibited her works in solo exhibitions across the UK, including with Turner Art Perspective, as well as in Switzerland, France, Athens and Spain.
In 2007, Carol Peace co-founded the Bristol Drawing School, where she was Artistic Director until 2011.
The Bristol Drawing School and beyond
Since then, she has enjoyed a six-month residency in Barcelona, and launched studios in Hay-on-Wye and Bethnal Green in London, spaces that allow her to focus on bigger and smaller-scale works.
Several of her large-scale sculptures are on permanent display at The Dorchester Coworth Park, Glyndebourne, and Lympstone Manor, while her smaller pieces and wall art have cemented her artistic reputation.
Although a figurative sculptor, Carol Peace relies heavily on drawing. “It’s all about trying to see, drawing enables that,” she says.
Drawing is the best way to heighten her sense of observation and find the form for her sculpture, she explains, and if her drawing was neglected, that sense of power and visual language gained through her observation would be lost.
“My inspiration comes from now, today, what’s happening. The quiet power of peaceful, often beautiful, rebellion. The striving for equality. I am doing what I can, how I can. My sculpture is made to give us strength and joy, provide a view to lift and to enable.”
From paper to person: the sculpting process
Sculptor Carol Peace begins her works in clay which, like charcoal, is quick to make marks with.
Once finished, the form is cast into iron resin or bronze resin, fixing those fluid marks of creation in the figure.
Her distinctive technique, light of touch and yet deeply expressive, is visible in the sculptures, almost as if they are being drawn with clay.
The figures, sometimes playful, sometimes sombre, are textural and balanced, while also imbued with an incredible poise and physicality.
More recently, Carol Peace has been testing different creative techniques and drawing inspiration from her early years.
A recent Leaves sculpture is reminiscent of an abstract piece created during college years, while her Petal sculpture, which represented nature: delicate and in need of protection, echoed earlier forms that used armour.
Carol Peace: a people’s artist
Carol’s down-to-earth, thoughtful approach to sculpture has endeared her to her growing army of devotees. Despite that success, her feet remain firmly on the ground: she is a people’s artist, ‘one of us’.
Poet John Terry said of her work: “They are first of all, real people. They yearn but they also give. They rise, they don’t fall. They strive; are eternal optimists. They look perhaps slightly disoriented, but there is no pleasure in falling, or in giving up, so they keep on. For us there is only the trying.”
Carol Peace says her sculptures are “about the rawness and confusion of being alive, the beauty and the complications of it, the freedom, exhilaration and the insecurities.
“This is not to say that all this is apparent in a piece of bronze, but it is what makes me go to the studio.”