Stephen West

Caru Cwn Love Dogs

Press Release
Caru Cwn/Love Dogs
4 April – 7 May 2011
Museum of Modern Art Wales, Y Tabernacl, Machynlleth

Stephen West shows new sculptures and drawings of dogs and other creatures

In this first one-person show since the 90s Stephen West borrows from the title of the 2000 Alejandro Iñàrritu film Amores Perros as the theme for a collection of expressionist drawings and dynamic sculptures carved in stone. The film highlights savagery as well as love in men and dogs and West’s dog sculptures use his knowledge of Romanesque animal carvings as well as the study of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture recently highlighted in the Royal Academy’s Wild Things exhibition and well represented in the 20th century collection at National Museum Wales in Cardiff.
In an interview commissioned by The Tabernacle from Pixel Foundry Artists Archive to accompany the exhibition, Stephen West talks to the renowned journalist Mavis Nicholson about his work and the reasons for becoming an artist. He says “the content and meaning of a picture or sculpture is to do with universal things like design, weight, form and space and that is what we respond to emotionally, it is a sense of how it occupies its ground”.
After working in public art administration as co-director of Cywaith Cymru Artwork Wales and Creative Development Director for Safle (the Welsh agency for promoting public art) West has returned to sculpture with a vigour that comes from years as a necessarily part time artist. West studied painting at St Martins School of Art in the late 70s under John Hoyland, Albert Herbert and Jennifer Durrant, among others, and started making stone reliefs while at the Royal College of Art painting school in the 80s where he was taught by Ken Kiff and Philip Rawson. He was recently elected a member of the prestigious Royal Cambrian Academy.
When Stephen showed his stone carvings in the former tannery building next to Machynlleth’s Museum of Modern Art Wales in 2009, he heard the story of three dogs attached the working tannery, guarding the building, chewing traces of meat from the hides and contributing their excrement to the tanning process. This invoked a series of dog drawings imagining three special dogs for the tannery. Stephen West’s charcoal drawing Ci Tanerdy won a CASW (Contemporary Arts Society Wales) purchase prize in 2009.
Dogs can occasionally savage us to death and more usually love and emotionally bond with us. It is this balance between the wild and the domestic which makes the image of a dog a powerful metaphor for human society. Three carved Tannery Dogs will return for this exhibition to inhabit the Owen Owen gallery at MOMA Wales. The carvings also reference great Welsh animal sculpture such as the wooden beasts from Llanrwst Almshouse, the Acton Park dog at Wrexham Museum and the hidden polychrome lions under the Britannia Bridge in Menai.
Different themes continue in other drawings in the exhibition, showing aspects of the artist’s life such as meetings round tables of administrators and artists or the restructuring of old architecture which for this artist is an occupation intimately associated with the making of sculpture. West’s great-great-grandfather was George Myers, a Victorian stone-mason and master builder who was the original owner of Bath stone quarries and whose workshop produced ‘gothic’ carving for Pugin. West acknowledges a tentative connection to the surviving Myers drawings of ox, lion and angel. He is convinced that the stylised dynamic sculptural forms of the early medieval and early modern periods were too quickly developed by more refined but less energetic artistic movements. He is happy to plunder these periods for forms that are dynamic today.
West uses limestone from Bath, local Grinshill (Shropshire) sandstone and welsh oak among other materials.
The accompaning DVD with an interview with Mavis Nicholson and clips of the working process at West’s studios in Llangadfan is produced by Pixel Foundry Artists Archive for Culture Colony as part of the MOMA artists series.

Further information and images from;
Agnes de Graff; MOMA Wales Y Tabernacl
Heol Penrallt Machynlleth Powys SY20 8AJ
01654 703355

Stephen West;
Dolpebyll Llangadfan Welshpool Powys SY21 0PU
01938 820469 07720 326031