Square World in collaboration with the Ingram Collection

The title of this exhibition is inspired by Geoffrey Clark’s Square World series of five aluminium relief sculptures (1959). Commissioned for St Chad’s, Rubery, Birmingham, they were removed shortly after installation and before the consecration of the newly built church over a disagreement concerning the theological interpretation of the difficult-to-determine symbolism of Clark’s reliefs.  A quintet of empty plinths is all that remains of the commission at the church in Birmingham and the sculptures are now part of the Ingram Collection’s loan to the Lightbox in Woking. The title of Clark’s Square World series is the jumping off point for this exhibition.

The juxtaposition of the rigid, hard-edged geometry of the square with the fluid, roundness of the globular ‘world’ instantly suggests a certain dissonance.

It has an oxymoronic feel, of something not quite fitting, of worlds being out of kilter, of things not being entirely right. These are sentiments that are as resonant today as when Clarke named the series in the late 1950s. Clarke left no decipher to his sculptural symbolism or the meaning of the ‘square world’ title, perhaps wishing to emphasise instead the potential of sculpture to sit in the world to embrace uncertainty, to resist easy definitions or fixed narrative. Clark’s project was made for a particular place but his reliefs have ended up in another. Reused and reimagined, but not encountered as originally intended, the empty plinths tell their own story, as do the sculptures now displayed in a museum. 

The very idea of a ‘square world’ raises lots of questions and yet offers no straightforward answers or explanations. It conjures ideas of surfaces, shapes and boundaries, of the physical and spiritual ‘edgelands’ of our world – spaces that are between one thing and another.

For the environmentalist Marion Shoard, the edgeland is the “interzone between urban and rural”, often somewhat neglected, overlooked, a place where the unexpected and surprising can often occur.

The exhibition is interested in creating conversations between historic and contemporary work that explore edgelands and interzones.

Edges can be sharp, hard and stable, but they can also be transgressed, messed up and hard to determine. What zones can we enter when we hang onto, or slip off, the edges of our square world?

Many of the works I have selected from the Ingram Collection were made by sculptors in the decades following the Second World War.

This is a particular strength of the Ingram Collection. Many of these works were made at a moment of political and social turmoil, as well as moments when new worlds were being imagined and shaped. Sculptors were experimenting materially – with the time-honoured materials of stone and bronze, but also experimenting with newly available materials and techniques.

In many of the works I have selected there is something of a sculptural shape shifting occurring, with a testing of sculpture’s vertical and horizontal limits. Political events and ideas also enter the sculptural narrative.

Many of these works have something to say about the state of the world and the human condition – sometimes through narrative force, at others more obliquely or opaquely.

The Ingram Collection is one of the largest and most significant publicly accessible collections of modern British art in the UK, available to all through a programme of loans and exhibitions. Founded in 2002 by serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Chris Ingram, the majority of the collection was donated by Chris in 2016 to the Ingram Art Foundation, which was established and funded by Chris to assist in fulfilling his ambition to make such works widely available for public display.

The collection now spans over 100 years of British art and includes over 600 artworks. More than 400 of these are by some of the most important British artists of the twentieth century, amongst them Edward Burra, Lynn Chadwick, Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth and Eduardo Paolozzi. The collection’s main focus is on the art movements that developed in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, and there is a particularly strong and in-depth holding of modern British sculpture.