Output details

ECHO - Commission for the sculpture trust in the Forest of Dean

This research investigates how the re-presentation of landscape, through sculptural means, can highlight the visibility of the constancy of mutability within the natural world. It aims to use the materiality of a specific place, or locus (such as the Kensley Quarry’s exposed geological time line) to focus on objective comparison as a metaphor for the inevitability of vicissitude, and the lack of permanence in nature. This research references Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Expanded Field’ text, the empirical understanding of landscape (Ben Tufnell’s book Land Art) , or locus, and the pictorial re-presentation of nature (Objectivity, book by Daston and Galison).

In 2008 Cattrell was invited by the Sculpture Trust to make a new permanent artwork for the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail. The FDST includes work by internationally renown artists such as Ian Hamilton Findlay, Cornelia Parker and Peter Randell Page http://www.forestofdean-sculpture.org.uk/ .

The Forest of Dean is on the English/Welsh border in Gloucestershire, and is a region which has its own distinct geology, culture, and community. Cattrell worked closely with local geologists, archeologists, and historians to research into all aspects of the place. Using state of the art LIDAR and FARO 3D digital scanning techniques, in combination with analogue casting processes, Cattrell made ‘Echo’. This permanent sculpture is a detailed double cast of the malleable surface of the soil, tree roots, and 310 million year old pennant sandstone at Kensley Quarry.

A catalogue was produced for the launch of ‘Echo’ with texts by Charles Darwent Independent on Sunday art critic. The project has been featured twice (2008, 2012) on BBC1’s ‘Countryfile’, and has been included in a number of publications, such as ‘Sculpture Parks & Trails of Britain & Ireland’, published by A & C Black (2013) and World Sculpture News magazine in autumn 2010.