Charles Gurrey MRSS

Beginning from a training as an architectural sculptor, my creative practice, based upon commissioned work, came to involve a response to specific sites, and in some cases to purposes for the work, including active uses to be made of it. 

Material is crucial to the work: it is in developing the properties of a given material - stone; bronze; wood; concrete, or whatever - that expressive possibilities get opened-up. In relation to work with text, what interests me is the use of lettering in a sculptural way, treating words and letters as things or objects - with some specific reason to find themselves as part of a sculpture, in a particular material, layout or site.

Recent self-directed work has found a concern with the subject of Statues: how to make genuine tributes to people, on the one hand; how to make sculptures that question the proposal to venerate, on the other. These works have developed a conjunction of image and text that has recurred through a certain amount of my work - where I have sought to establish a concrete relation between the two.