By Leafy Ways (No. 58)

Description

In the early 1970s Ivor Abrahams (1935-2015) began to explore the strange world of the English suburban garden. This body of work twisted the familiar, domestic landscape into something more unsettling and strange, taking common elements of the garden and applying them in configurations which are at once both achingly familiar and utterly bizarre.

“My ideas have been to try to destabilise and undermine the existing canons in sculpture. The questions for me are poised between artifice and nature, illusion and verisimilitude. The garden work was always an ersatz composite, makeshift and experimental.”

Ivor Abrahams

2008

Following on from interviews with the artist, Sophie Raikes (Assistant Curator (Sculpture), the Henry Moore Institute) digs into his early life and work to uncover how Abrahams’ relationship with the ‘garden’ developed into a theme for his work.