- Venue
- Sulgrave Manor
- Location
From The Inside Out is a series of abstract figurative sculptures by Pam Foley, installed in the apple orchard at Sulgrave Manor. Using forms abstracted from nature, Pam has constructed sensual, feminine and organic art works, cast and illuminated from within using strips soaked in dyes. Pam studied many botanical and life drawings, and using her knowledge of the female form, started with ‘shapes’ recognised as being pre-historic in origin. The abstracted forms that emerged are bold, colourful, and exciting.
Each season is represented by a single sculpture; except for Winter, which is a group of three pale ‘sisters’. This triad of twisted human-plant forms rising over 2 metres towards a fading sun, are indeed ‘met again¹’, in a barren part of the orchard, representing an ‘ending’. Largely monochromatic, with black and grey streaks set against a translucent golden background, they are suggestive of the three golden ones, who care for the rare apple tree ‘Golden Immortalitus²’.
On entering the orchard, the first sculpture you meet, aligned with the apple trees, is Summer. The most abstracted form, standing over 1 ½ metres tall, with a warm, curvaceous crimson coloured trunk and limb-like base, this piece is adorned with a top that splays out like a pressed flower in two dimensions. Summer stands alone in a self-sufficient declaration of strength and beauty, yet contains portholes through which you can view the rest of the orchard. The gradated colours turn to orange and yellow near the top, gifting you, the viewer, with the golden apple³.
Enclosed by a ring of apple trees, Spring is the most obvious human form, rich and fecund, displaying fruit and bountiful generative prowess. There is a surreal quality about this piece, a Dali-like dream of a human opened up like a peapod displaying seeds/eggs/apples, with a Giacometti-like elongation to the head, arms and neck. You, the viewer, are watching the giant pod split open to produce the first human4. Placed amongst the trees and grass, with a deep greenish blue colouration, the camouflage is perfect.
Lying nearby is Autumn, an abstracted human form, fallen and decaying in repose: time for Persephone to return to the underworld. The curved and indented surfaces are reminiscent of species of fungi, growing on dying wood. Several microenvironments are evident, allowing rainfall, moisture and fallen apples to accumulate, along with insects. The pieces invite touch, and a closer viewing of Autumn is rewarded by seeing the richness of the autumnal palette used.
The viewer cannot help but notice the life cycles and seasonal changes illustrated here. The forms are a strange, often dreamlike, symbiosis of plant life and human bodies, layered with ancient clues about life on earth . Pam has successfully articulated, in three-dimensions, deeply subconscious ideas that meld perfectly with the orchard. Rarely have I seen such a powerful melding of form with meaning: truly sculptural painting, or painting in the round.
Paul Turner, Ph.D.
¹ From Macbeth (I, i, 1-2).
² Also known as The Hesperides from Ancient Greek mythology.
³ From the Iliad.
4 Inuit Creation myths.
Ph.D.
