The Magna Carta Fountain

Project Details

A water feature designed for Egham High Street to commemorate the signing of The Magna Carta.

Design and Production by The Lawson Baker Partnership

Hydrodynamics by Watermark of Rochester.

Date completed: 1995.

Alternative Design for the Magna Carta Fountain (above)

A Prayer for Lebanon

Project Details

Dimensions: 40cm x 25cm x 15cm (w x h x d)

Weight: 30kg

Date: 1994

A Prayer for Lebanon

It was 1972 and my first wife Sue and I were invited to Lebanon for our honeymoon.

One afternoon, after a typically late lunch, in Tripoli on the north coast, ending at about 10pm, our friends finally took us up to Bsharri, a village perched on a small plateau at the edge of Wadi Qadisha and where Kahlil Gibran was born on 6th January 1883. There, in what is known as the Sacred Valley, we found the Gibran Museum.

Would you believe we arrived after midnight?! My friends knocked up the museum keeper who promptly invited us in for drinks and to smoke the ever-circulating Hookah Shisha pipe. Eventually at about 2am we got in to the museum and that was a life changing event for me. I had read ‘The Prophet’ extensively. Sue had introduced me to it before we travelled.

The Prophet was written in 1923 in New York. It became one of the best selling books in the world and he became the third best selling poet in the world with Shakespeare as the No 1. In 1912, as a young man, Kahlil Gibran (1883 -1931) had been taken by his mother, together with all her family, to live in Boston, USA, after her divorce in Lebanon.

Think about this whole scenario, it seems amazing given the difficulty of transport to the other side of the world. Once in Boston, Gibran met Mary Haskell who, realising his potential as a 30 year old artist writer and thinker, sent him to the Beaux Arts in Paris where he is reputed to have met the elderly Rodin (1840 -1917) and was also heavily influenced by the drawing of William Blake.

With all this as a background, I had looked at the drawings of Gibran in the museum and held some in my hands. At this moment I conceived the idea that Gibran’s work should be made three dimensional. He was devout and had a great interest in the Bahá’í faith and had met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the founder of the religion. His drawings were quite mystical.

So… much, much later my idea began to come to fruition. When I began to sculpt it was a ‘divine intervention’. I had caught Hepatitis B from a needle stick injury from a patient in my surgery and when the virus hit I was confined to my bedroom for nearly 4 months.

As I recovered I began to sculpt, all I had ever made before was a coil pot at school! The first work I made was Almitra, the mythical lady from The Prophet who asked the questions….” Speak to Us of Love…..Speak to us of Children”….there are 29 poetical themes. Here surely were the seeds of a ‘Gibran Park’ filled with sculptures echoing the themes of each poem.

I made this second work of Almitra to portray my horror of the fact that war had started in Lebanon not long after my visit in 1972. It was by now 1987 and the Christian Muslim Jewish middle eastern conflicts raged,as they have done and sadly, still do. Here is Almitra with a Moslem Berka but with her hands in Christian prayer, my interpretation of ‘A Prayer for Lebanon’. You will see other works from The Gibran Series in my portfolio and no the park has NOT yet come to fruition. How it nearly did at Maryland University, near Washington DC, is a separate story!

The Rites of Spring

Project Details

Dimensions: 40cm x 25cm x 15cm (w x h x d)

Weight: 2.2kg

Date: 1994

The Rites of Spring

This was one of my earliest art works and I had the temerity to take the little bronze down to Dame Elisabeth Frink’s home in Dorset, to ask her opinion and advice. It was bad timing as her husband Alec had just been diagnosed with cancer and it was not long before he succumbed and died.

We corresponded during this difficult period and she told me she was following my career in sculpture and gave me various pieces of advice. She also seconded my application for membership of the Arts Club.

It was not long before she too was undergoing treatment for a malignancy which later took her life. I suspect this terrible tragedy prevented the RA from having their first woman president. She was very well respected and I think well considered at that time for this unique and most important position in the art world.

We lost a wonderful human being far too young. A seriously important artist, I remember her very, very often. As a member of the Arts Club and a regular visitor to the RA, walking from Green Park station, I regularly pass her ‘Horse and Rider’ on the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly and pay my respects to her memory.

The Rite of Spring represents the Dance of Life and is joyous. It is a bronze edition of 8 and there are 5 castings still to make. I have one in my studio for sale.

The Globe at LIFFE

Project Details

Dimensions (cm): 150 x 150 x 210 (w x d x h)

Weight: 4,000kg

Date: 1994

The Globe at LIFFE

At the same time as LIFFE commissioned the ‘OPEN OUTCRY’ trader bronze in 1991, I was summoned to the office of the chairman of the stock exchange, Sir Hugh Smith. I remember being very impressed with the beautiful early bracket clocks on antique side tables in the corridors and then into the great man’s office and there was a magnificent little Tompion*.

He kindly commissioned me to make a new sculpture, again in bronze, to my own design for The Stock Exchange to gift to LIFFE and LOTM as they parted company and moved to their new HQ at Cannon Bridge.

My studio team and I duly designed the trading globe which was mounted on a rotating pedestal base and had 5 major trading currencies sculpted onto the Greenwich Meridian. Sterling; US Dollar; Euro; Yen and Swiss Franc were then all individually highlighted by a strong laser as the globe rotated.

Came the dedication and unveiling ceremony, which should have been a great celebration, but as fate would deal, it was held at 6pm on Black Wednesday, September 16th 1992, the night that George Soros had run Sterling into the ground.

The new LIFFE trading floor had closed. Sir Hugh Smith, Michael Jenkins and a group of the most senior members of both teams stood ashen faced and gave their speeches, duly dedicated the sculpture and scurried off for a very strong drink and to mop up the havoc that had been wrought by one of the worst days for the UK currency in trading history.

Speculators had forced the British government to pull Sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the ERM. I had also been commissioned to make the plaque to commemorate the official opening of LIFFE by HM The Queen.

Some photos (rather poor quality I’m afraid) of that are shown below. It is extraordinary to have been involved with so many key historical events in such a short time. Sterling and the Euro; The Runnymede Magna Carta Memorial; The Opening of The Channel Tunnel; The Opening of the LIFFE exchange on Black Wednesday; The Opening of the new Parliamentary Building at 1 Parliament Street…

* Thomas Tompion (1639–1713) was an English clock maker, watchmaker and mechanician who is still regarded to this day as the Father of English Clock making.

BT – ‘The Piper’

Project Details

Dimensions (cm): 40 x 25 x 15 (w x h x d)

Weight: 17.1kg

Commissioned by: Iain Vallance – Chairman of British Telecom

Date: 1994

BT – ‘The Piper’

The BT Piper, an epic logo, was developed by the Wolff Olins consultancy in 1991 to become an important part of the new corporate image of what had been known up to that point as British Telecom.  At the time, their (Wolff Olins) recommendation to British Telecom was to change their company name to Unison, which of course later became the name of a Trade Union. The British Telecom board decided however that Unison was not appropriate and opted instead for ‘BT’, but they did use ‘The Piper’ as a keynote part of their branding.

Iain Vallance, the then CEO, had ideas to have this logo made into a three dimensional heroic sculpture and I was to be commissioned. Apparently Wolff Olins muted this idea and so the beautiful Piper, for which my pattern maker Andrew Cocks and I had designed the maquette, was never enlarged. I had envisaged it in High Holborn opposite the old Daily Mirror building outside the BT HQ but this was to be another sculptural disappointment.

Iain Vallance, not to have his party completely pooped, quietly had me make an enlargement to about 24cm in height which was duly cast.  He kept it in his CEO’s office at BT headquarters in London.

The ‘Piper’ branding lasted until April 2003 when it was felt that another change was needed and the ‘Piper’ was dropped so I wonder where that sculpture is now?