Balance
The Sculptures of Hamish Horsley
By Dominique Side, View Magazine
Issue 8, 1997
The Way, Durham UK
‘If so many people are very critical of art in public spaces’” says Horsley, “this is because it often does nothing to address what I think is fundamental: harmony in the environment. Public art should create a focus which allows people to relate at a human level to balance and harmony.
His work called The Way serves as a gateway to Durham Cathedral, in northern England. It does not compete with the cathedral as a second focus; rather it pays homage to the magnificent medieval masterpiece.
Lungta is a Tibetan word meaning ‘wind-horse’ , or the vital force in each of us. In naming this sculpture Lungta, Horsley shows how a principle from a traditional asian culture can be vividly expressed in a modern idiom.
Hamish Horsley was born in New Zealand, spent several years of his youth in India as a novice Hindu monk, and has lived in England for the past twenty years where he has a growing reputation as a photographer and sculptor. As a sculptor, he specialises in large works in public spaces.
He is now a follower of Buddhism but makes no obvious reference to Buddhist iconography in his art. “How can I imitate a carver of ‘mani’ stones? All my training, all my artistic references are Western. If I try to imitate, I could finish up creating visual clichés. My beliefs and my art are separate, but totally interwoven.”
Horsley believes that to be successful, public sculptures must have a spiritual input. “I don’t mean spiritual as in religious. I mean that they must have a sense of spirit, a sense of place. I prefer to use natural imagery and forms, and relate them back into the landscape.”
Horsley is currently working on Samten Kyil, Tibetan for “Garden of Contemplation.” It’s to be situated in the grounds of London’s Imperial War Museum, which shows not the glories of imperil conquest but the horrors of all war. A project by the Tibet Foundation, the Garden is dedicated to world peace and in particular to the message of the Dalai Lama and the sufferings of the Tibetan people.
Samten Kyil - development model
The sacred heart of the Garden will be an authentic Tibetan Kalachakra mandala, designed by monks of the Gyumé Tantric College in India, cast in bronze and then set into a large disk of black Kilkenny stone. This traditional piece is set among four great panels of contemporary sculpture of the four elements and surrounded by a pergola of steel and wood.
In this case the project did not begin with a beautiful landscape, but with an ordinary, inner city landscape in which an inspiring space will be created. The aim is an environment which will have an impact; simply walking into the arena described by the pergola will produce an experience for everyone. The beautiful park surrounding it will invite visitors to look again at the richness of the planet we are destroying.
‘This is a monument of the time, a monument for the end of the century. It is possible to be consciously contemporary and yet in harmony with the environment around us.”