Bodies - Mountains – Bombs

Peter Bevan – A Sculptor in Clay

Peter Bevan is an artist working in clay. A painter by training, he found the process too direct perhaps, and too solitary. At the Glasgow School of Art he discovered his milieu for sculpture and ceramics, where kiln-side discussions and problem solving made for lively dialogue.  As a maker, the move seemed a natural progression, from painting objects to making them. He models ideas to make his thoughts visible, and through form and material his concerns become manifest.

The objects fluctuate between the geological, ornamental, natural and manmade. Unifying them is the malleable plasticity of clay.

Clay’s ability to morph and mimic is harnessed to effect in the sculptures produced by Bevan. But it is not clay for ceramic’s sake. Instead it is clays ability to emulate and represent that attracts Bevan to the material.

Collectively the works present the possibility of a narrative, playing out in an imagined landscape: Torso forms are wrapped and contained. Mountains become artifacts, in a museum perhaps. Magical-realism is the focus of figurative forms, which are shrouded and disguised, or conversely, perhaps in the process of revealing themselves. Flowerbombs suggest an explosion of life, reminiscent of Seeger and Guthrie’s seminal song, Un-neutron Bomb, with its promise of a better world.

Objects are embellished with colour and pattern; their surfaces a mirror of the Eastern traditions and architecture that inspire them. Mountains are realistic in their rendering, but their scale suggests a memory or image of the real thing - ideas captured, with reverence and poise.

Bombs and landmines are subverted, made celebratory with flowers and decorative detailing. The violent function of these munitions transformed instead into positive energies, ready to burst.

Bevan’s work evokes much of Buddhist iconography. The use of terracotta clay to model sculptures are like the votive figurative forms of South Indian sculpture. This is no coincidence. Bevan has spent a lot of time in India working in Gujarat, with clay, bronze, wood, and a community of like-minded craftsmen and artists to collaborate with. In a place where he feels anything is possible his adoption of sacred offerings into the everyday transforms a specific spiritual vocabulary into universal symbolism.

Votive figurines and Stupa silhouettes are all part of Bevan’s language. Like the power of the Stupa to balance and collect energies, Bevan seeks to portray the vigor latent in the living things around us. In our own central gravity, erupting mountains, buds and bombs. These objects all suggest activity of one kind or another. A moment paused, new growth breaking forth, powerful transitions from sleeping to waking, dormant to quaking.

These auspicious sculptures are presented to us, not as holy offerings, but on stools and upturned tables: Pedestals of the everyday.

As with the Stupa’s role to promote harmony, prosperity and peace, Bevan’s work sets out, though a process of thinking, making, collaborating and communicating, to make us feel the energy instilled in the work he makes, and in turn the things growing and breathing all around us.

Katy West 2016

Katy West is a designer and curator based in Glasgow