Laurence Edwards

Born Suffolk, UK

Lives & Works UK

Laurence Edwards has been working in bronze for over 30 years, creating figurative sculptures for a growing national and international audience. One of the most important figurative sculptors working in the UK, he is also one of the few sculptors who casts his own work.

Largely based in his native Suffolk where he works with his foundry team, Edwards' work explores the power of the figure as a visual metaphor for aspects of the human condition. The struggle of life as a precarious balance of burdens, responsibilities and achievement. Fascinated by the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process, the strength of his sculptures illustrate the physicality and power of bronze as a material, but they also metaphorically depict ideas that intrigue Edwards - entropy, the descent of a system into chaos, a human relationship to the earth

Using organic materials that leave imperfections in the malleable surface and become intimately connected to the process of casting, Edwards creates a language in bronze that talks to the balance between man and nature. The variety of process marks he retains tell the story of how and why each work came to be.

Laurence Edwards studied sculpture at Canterbury College of Art and bronze casting at the Royal College of Art with Sir Antony Caro. After winning a Henry Moore Bursary, the Angeloni Prize for Bronze Casting and an Intach Travelling Scholarship, he studied traditional casting techniques in India and Nepal, an experience that not only influenced his treatment of form and technique, but also gave him the necessary tools to establish his own atelier and foundry.

In 2006, Edwards won the Royal Society of Portrait Sculpture Award, and became an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 2012. Man of Stones was unveiled at the Sainsbury Centre in Norfolk in 2019 and in 2018, Edwards was commissioned by Doncaster Council to create a sculpture that celebrated the lives of those who worked in the collieries around Doncaster. A Rich Seam was unveiled in Print Office Street in 2021. Major exhibitions of his work have been held at Messums West in the UK in 2022 and Orange Regional Gallery in Australia in 2023. His Walking Men series were presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2023.