Hamish Horsley - Drawings and sculpture
Review by Ham & High
July 3rd 1981
Instinctively a sculptor moves around a body, grasping the way in which flesh, bones and muscle interlink. So when he picks up a pencil his drawings are liable to reflect the third dimension.
Marie Clare and doll
Hamish Horsley, however, who lives in Milton Park, Highgate, and is exhibiting at New Zealand House in the Haymarket, avoids the tendency in his drawings to produce working drafts for more weighty work.
With a positive use of light and shade and a refusal to flatter, he observes people from the back, in casual repose or buried in a book. His drawing of Marie Clare and doll is unusual in being comparatively macabre as the girl has a huge doll propped by her for no apparent purpose. One wonders if the doll will mysteriously find its feet and take charge.
Gertie recurs – unpretentiously dozing in a chair, enjoying perhaps a respite from daily demands. And to consolidate the presence Horsley interprets her in plaster too, big buttocked and immutable.
Horsley is keen on self-revelation and hangs three self-portraits. Two are facial studies, one with a serious resolve which in the second intensifies into a frown. The third is a full length portrait in which his head, rather than being enlarged as the self-reflection suggests, seems disproportionally small.
As though seeing diversion he also observes Hampstead Heath. With broad strokes he achieves a sense of freedom, depicting two figures in a dip of land. In another work, a bench like so many of his people is seen from the back – with one end sagging, no doubt vandalised, but the slight hill with trees it overlooks steeped in tranquillity.
Rather than seeming inanimate, his studies for sculpture have presence, like abstraction of desert bound beings. One – an enveloped form – is poised like the guardian of some secret. Another in Portland stone takes figurative form, a sentinel who poses with pride but is possibly vulnerable.
New Zealand House, Haymarket, London. Until July 10th.