Orc - Jas Davidson, 2010 (compound media)
Just visited the as-yet-unfinished new studio of Jas Davidson. Jas is a well-known bronze sculptor and one of our most active Inside Out artists. One of his latest pieces – Orc3 – was shortlisted for the 2010 Threadneedle prize.
Jas has just sold his old gallery and studio and is in the process of moving into a new space in the heart of Oswestry, just around the corner (literally) from Studio a1. It’s an old stable block behind a long-vanished pub, and he’s converting it into a combination house and studio surrounding a courtyard garden. He’s only just started, but it’s going to be amazing when it’s finished. With any luck, it’ll be ready for the Borderland Visual Arts Open Studios weekends next spring. It’s going to be great to have him as a neighbour.
There’s a strong social-political theme running through a lot of Jas’ work, one that explores the tension between freedom and restraint, beauty and violence. He’s not your usual brand of North Shropshire abstract expressionist – he describes himself as a modern figurative sculptor, but there is also something of the symbolist in his work. His faces and bodies are the images of Pan-like archetypes. He describes one of his main influences as the vernacular of folklore – he is a “pagan” sculptor: a sculptor of the pagus, the untamed countryside. I think he harks back to those deep, ancestral roots that so inspired Greeks and the Romans. Orc is a direct descendent of the herm – sculpted, like his Greek and Roman counterparts – in the smooth, modern idiom, but drawn from some rougher, harder, darker, myth-hidden past.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Jas does now that he has the freedom of his own space to work in. I’d like to see Jas working on a much larger scale – and exhibiting outside: in some wild and tangled wood, where his sculptures lurk like avatars of Pan himself.
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