Jay Battle
Cutting Gate
2008
36 x 15.5 x 8 cm
Waxed Steel
Jay Battle moved to England from Toronto in the late 80s to pursue his interest in medieval architecture and sculpture.
He was able partly to fulfil this as a member of the group helping to restore Salisbury Cathedral.
Although still young, he was promoted to Head Carver and commissioned to sculpture for new figures for the cathedral's west front, an aspect of the building that had not been added to in the last hundred years.
That time spent working on medieval forms nurtured his desire to create more contemporary, self-expressive work.
In 1995 he started up an independent studio to explore these ideas and has worked there full time since 2001.
'I am always inspired by seeing the evidence of man within our 'natural' environment. It is not usually the beautiful creations that grab me, but the rusting hulk of something once quite powerful and controlling, or the scar of some redundant industry.'
'My work is informed by my responses to this presence. Very deliberate impressions or markers left in our landscape or the fading technologies that once controlled it.'
'Part of my language expresses the ability to reorder a natural arrangement of materials - reflecting how I see our ability to reorder nature to our advantage: a repetitive arrangement through which the randomness and individuality of each element become uniform.'
'In articulating this, most of my work incorporates containment, separation or imposed boundaries and illustrates a level of control over natural materials.'