on form sculpture – Confirmation, Celebration, Explanation & Expectation

24th January 2024

This is not an epitaph.

There will be no on form this summer. Don’t despair! All is not lost, throughout our website, you will find celebration, explanation and hope for the future.

Celebration: What a thing we made, between us! Since 2002, our little sculpture show – inspired by two unruly pumpkins, a group of obsessively hardworking artists, and a recently divorced multi-tasker in search of a new adventure –  has grown into a feature on the summer calendar, a place where people come for love, conversation and beauty, and a serious source of income for artists working in that most neglected medium, stone. We’ve also supported six local charities, and given them a space to talk about their work and engage with our visitors.

Stone, stone, stone. It has been our delight to ask people to touch the sculpture, to connect with the time embedded in it, to understand the process by which form and meaning are carved out of rock. I hope that one thing we have achieved is to inform people about the extraordinary work that goes into sourcing, transporting, roughing out, carving and polishing stone until it sings with meaning, and then finding a way to install it safely in its place, whether for exhibition or forever. The Ballroom installation in 2022, conceived by Anna Greenacre (of whom more below) was a dusty, chiselled view into the stone-carver’s world.

Special thanks to those of you who bought sculpture from us. Some of you were big-time art collectors, others were buying for the first time. From what we’ve heard, the forms you’ve made your own are still doing their work as objects that give spaces their soul.

Thanks also to all of you who came and wandered and looked and touched and questioned and fell in love and lounged about and drank tea and took photographs and painted and brought your friends and talked to sculptors and learned how to carve and……all the other things we don’t even know you were up to.

As the years went by, we added more elements: dance, music, workshops, a bookshop sometimes and more than a dash of subtle activism.

Explanation: So why the pause?

Well. 2022 was the year which our curator, Anna Greenacre, had always set as her last year. Then our creative director, Rosie Pearson, was elected as a District Councillor (Green Party of course.) The process of planning and installing on form has always been intense and life-consuming. We just couldn’t have taken on somebody new at a time when …..

All good things should pause from time to time. We don’t believe in things getting indefinitely bigger. We believe that, in time, art will bubble up of its own accord. Infact, this is already happening.

Expectation: There is lots of good news.

This summer, we will be opening the garden, without any sculpture, for our usual midsummer month, but on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays only. You can head over to our Asthall Manor site for more details, but there will be no bookings.

So the dates will work out as:

June: Thursday 13^th, Friday 14^th, Saturday 15^th, Thursday 20^th, Friday 21^st, Saturday 22^nd, Thursday 27^th, Friday 28^th, Saturday 29^th.

July: Thursday 4^th, Friday 5^th, Saturday 6^th, Thursday 11^th, Friday 12^th, Saturday 13^th

That’s 15 days! And there will be some special events during that time.

You can also come and join in with the activities of our new Community Interest Company, Asthall WildAsthall Wild (CIC). Based in the walled garden, resident grower Tim Mitchell and others will offer workshops and retreats throughout the years to come. See upcoming events on our ‘What’s On’ page.

Sculpture from previous exhibitions is still available to buy from our website.