Martin Pearce

Like the sculpture of Jean Arp, Martin Pearce’s intriguing and richly suggestive work has an amorphic, nebulous quality. It alludes to both bodily forms and shapes in the landscape, from folds in hills and mountains to stones and bones seemingly smoothed by water and wind, the continually transforming structures of cloudscapes. Built up in slabs and coils, these objects draw in part on his local Sussex coast for ideas, making essentially biomorphic forms which do not settle easily on the mind. Ambiguous and elusive, some recent pieces resemble biological organs and molecular, cellular structures. This is a preternatural and disquieting abstraction that is also highly tactile, revealing quite different sensual qualities in clay. Martin’s art has taken an increasingly sculptural direction in recent years. He lives and works in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex.

David Whiting