A morning drive to Tisbury near Salisbury and a chance to view a two-year restoration project that brought a 13th-century tithe barn – the largest thatched building in the country – back to life as an exhibition and event space.
It sits alongside a former dairy that has also been converted to a gallery and forms the focal point of Messums Wiltshire – an independent business run by a team led by Jonathan Messum which – along with Messums London on Cork Street – supports the promotion of modern and contemporary art.
We were lucky to have picked a good day (weatherwise) to wander around – inside and out – and sample coffee and cake within a restaurant facility that also offers fine dining.
Our visit corresponded with a major presentation of work by sculptor Laurence Exdwards showcasing large scale bronze sculptures together with small scale maquettes and studies on display for the first time and offering a comprehensive survey of his working process.
There’s more on the website – messumswiltshire.com – from where the following has been extracted:
“One of the few sculptors who casts his own work, Laurence Edwards is fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process.
The driving force behind his work is bronze, an alloy that physically and metaphorically illustrates entropy, the natural tendency of any system in time to tend towards disorder and chaos.
“His sculptures express the raw liquid power of bronze, its versatility, mass and evolution, and the variety of process marks he retains tell the story of how and why each work came to be.“
His exhibition runs through to October 16th
Wiltshire – a beautiful and much underrated county. We now live in Hampshire but had a lovely holiday in Wilts last year, based at Lacock. I’m afraid that I didn’t really appreciate it, all the years we lived in Bath.