News Archive

Fernando Casasempere - Installation Press Release

22 April 2007

An astonishing new commission using industrial waste from the copper industry will be installed at Jerwood Sculpture Park, Ragley Hall on May 14 2007.

Ragley Hall, a seventeenth century stately home with a Capability Brown park, provides the setting for the Jerwood Sculpture Park. Sited across four hundred acres of gardens and park, sculptures range from major work by internationally renowned artists such as Antony Gormley and Elisabeth Frink to exciting new work by the winners of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize. The Jerwood Sculpture Park is the only sculpture park in the Midlands and is one of the few non-profit making sculpture parks nationally.

Fernando Casasempere, a Chilean sculptor, has been commissioned by the Jerwood Foundation to produce a new work specifically for the Jerwood Sculpture Park at Ragley. Fernando's piece, entitled Under the Forest, is a ceramic sculpture comprising five colossal, tree-trunk like forms. Conceived to melt into the existing vegetation, in spring and summer the surrounding trees will give branches to the structure. Each element is over three metres high and weighs over eight hundred kilos. Fired using a twenty metre industrial kiln at a brick factory (Baggeridge Brick in Sedgley), Casasempere's work crosses the divide between sculpture and ceramics.

Casasempere, who has exhibited internationally, is one of the few sculptors working in clay and the scale and technical expertise required to fire a piece on this scale are remarkable. Recycling waste material from the Chilean petro-chemical and copper industries and mixing with British clay from the Midlands, the work reveals the possibilities of an often forgotten material. Casasempere's sculpture is the first in a series of commissions of new work for the Jerwood Sculpture Park.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION OR IMAGES PLEASE CONTACT PENNY SYCHRAVA PR: 0796 791 5339, pennysychrava@hotmail.com