One of my favourite artists is the sculptor Peter Randall-Page. Based in Devon, just East of Dartmoor, Peter works mostly in stone, making art works that explore and reflect the patterns, geometry and mathematic relationships found in biology.
There's an etymological relationship between art, artifice and the artificial, but my interest is the opposite: I see art as a natural aspect of our behaviour as a species, just as other animals have their inevitable forms of culture. What I enjoy most about Peter's work is how alive and organic it feels. Somehow he intersects animal, vegetable and mineral, to make sculptures that look like a living part of the landscape.
I loved Peter's sculptures at the Eden Project and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and wanted to see more. After the pristine finish of the Eden commission, I was irrationally shocked to find his pieces in the Forest of Dean being colonised by mosses when I visited in 2008. Of course outdoor sculpture has to weather naturally, and the ageing of work is often intended by its maker, but initially I struggled with the contrast in presentation.
A year later and a year further on in my own outdoor arts career, I couldn't miss Peter's major exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (closes January 2010) and headed up the M1 earlier this summer.
It was fantastic to see so much of his work, but strangely unsatisfying to see it all in one place.
I guess I'd got used to the idea of searching for Peter's stones: making special journeys and enjoying the sense of discovery and the relationship between the work and its location. For me, Peter's work needed to occupy a more fertile space than it was given at YSP. And the continuous reminders of the 'no touching' rule hardly invited personal connection to the art. Of course I snuck a few touches while the stewards weren't looking: just to look is to miss half the point of sculpture.
The YSP experience reminded me how important environment is to my enjoyment of art, and made me want to re-experience Peter's work in a wilder context. The artist Jenny Kyle lives near Peter, and had told me before about a series of his sculptures installed around the Teign Valley in the early 90s by Common Ground. I got hold of a beautiful book about the project, 'Granite Song', with photos by Chris Chapman and some interesting essays. I learned that granite contains no fossils because it predates life on earth.
Armed with grid references and a few spare hours when passing through Devon this week, I set out to try to experience some more of Peter's art in a wilder and less formal context.
This piece, 'Passage', stands perfectly atop an avenue of old Beech trees across the valley from Castle Drogo, reached by an unmarked permissive path up the hill from the River Teign. The weathering of the stone has created the illusion of the lead inlay standing proud of the cut faces of the boulders. It appears to have stood there forever.
On an island in the River Teign downstream of Chagford sits 'Granite Song' itself, the first of the iconic split boulder forms that have become such a motif in Peter's work. It's exquisite - and in quiet counterpoint to its setting of woodland and rushing water. You'd miss it from the footpath if you weren't looking for it.
Perhaps it's special to me on its own account - it's pretty gorgeously curvy and pointy, and on a more intimate scale than many of the pieces carved after it. Or perhaps it's because I waded across a river and beheld it with all my senses that the joy of it still rings in my ears.
