Guy Haddon Grant’s monochromatic sculptures and drawings lie at the boundary between abstraction and figuration, and his show ‘Ashes’ opens at Piccadilly’s Dellasposa Gallery from 7th – 25th March. The award-winning Haddon Grant is one of Britain’s most important young sculptors, and his aesthetically fascinating works are inspired by natural organic forms and the human figure.
How did you get into sculpture, Guy?
I’ve been making sculpture as long as I can remember. I’ve always drawn; I’ve always sculpted.
You went and studied the techniques of the Renaissance masters for two years in Florence – what was the best, or most interesting technique you learned?
Really the most useful lesson was learning how to work day in day out. All the technical stuff I loved, but realising that most obvious of lessons – you get out only as much as you put in – really had the most profound effect.
Can you tell us a bit about your show that’s opening this week?
I had a lot of work I’d been creating over the past year or so. It’s good to take the work out of the studio, reassess it, see it with fresh eyes. I was invited by the Dellasposa Gallery to put together the work for a pop up exhibition and I leapt at the opportunity. We’d been speaking about putting on an exhibition for a while – the location is super and the space suited perfectly.
Will it be a range of works? How long has it taken to bring together?
This particular body of work (the cloud totems, drawings etc) has been the focus for the past four years or so. I’ve exhibited various parts, as it has evolved. This show is mostly made up of recent developments (over the past year or so) candle soot drawings, works in plaster. We (the curator and I) had to be fairly restrained, to allow enough space for the pieces to breath.
Your work really varies from totems to line studies – are you able to jump between styles or do you have to only focus on one at a time?
I like to have a lot of different projects on the go. I’m not sure whether I’d describe their differences as a change in style, more in mood. The different projects inform one another. When I return to one I bring to it all that I have been working through on one of the other pieces. The rhythm and gesture is often the same; I’m just trying to find different words to say the same thing.
Interview: Josh Jones
Photo: Tom Medwell
