The World Gone Pear-Shaped

In 2007 Deborah van der Beek delivered a major commission for a garden in Oxfordshire. It was a very welcome opportunity to work on a grander scale than most of her previous work, but with all the "casting and carting" she is discovering what Peter Schaffer meant when he called sculpture "one of the world's few truly heroic pursuits". The World Gone Pear-Shaped flows from current hopes and anxieties about the future of life on earth. Artists have long used fruit as a metaphor for both the abundance and transience of life; the pear's irregular shape and in particular its knobbly skin suited van der Beek's purpose. The surface is cast with organic forms: fossils, insects, leaves, nuts, gourds, berries, fruit – some half-eaten, some rotting; around the equator a parched mud-cracked belt with dead fish and the skeleton of a bird. Everywhere, signs of man's presence – footprints, tyre marks, coins, half-buried cars and other detritus of the machine age. A large bite exposes the core: the single bronze pip, burnished as gold, perhaps suggesting hope and the earth's capacity for regeneration.

The World Gone Pear-Shaped was exhibited in "Spectrum", the Centennial Celebrations show of the Royal British Society of Sculptors at Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury in summer 2007, and at "The World Gone Pear-Shaped", a solo exhibition at the London offices of the European Commission at 8 Storey's Gate SW1 in October 2007.

It is available in bronze in an edition of 6.

"The Fifth Horseman was made later, though I'd had the idea some time before. He's an apocalyptic figure, warning of what we have done to our environment. Like the Pear, I made him in clay and stuck all sorts of relevant things in to it to make my point: his gluttonous stomach groans with hamburgers and chips (every sesame seed casts beautifully) beer bottle tops and coins. His spine is a traffic jam of dinky cars, his ribs light bulbs and discarded cans. In his outstretched hand is a tiny young bird, representing the vulnerability of life and of Nature."
This work was the centrepiece of Deborah's exhibition at the 2008 Corsham Festival, and is on show again at the Threadneedle Figurative Prize exhibition at Mall Galleries, London SW1 from 20 August until 6 September 2008.

Don Quixote

En vn lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que viuia vn hidalgo de los de lança en astillero, adarga antigua, rozin flaco y galgo corredor.

Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and an ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

Our introduction to the first great character of modern fiction, and still after four hundred years the most universal, an embodiment of all human frailties and virtues. As Harold Bloom writes in his introduction to Edith Grossman's new translation, "...this great book contains within it all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him." And for many artists too; Deborah is aware that she has embarked upon a well-trodden path. She started work on the Don Quixote theme in 2007; in the autumn she made a pilgrimage to La Mancha and the Sierra Morena, the hilly area of northern Andalucia, setting of many of Quixote's deeds and debacles. A Sancho Panza will follow.

Don Quixote I will be cast by Pangolin Editions in Chalford, Gloucestershire later this year, and be shown at Deborah's exhibition at Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire in October.

Deborah van der Beek working on Don Quixote II in her studio in Lacock in February 2008

Don Quixote I