New sculpture for Thorpe Meadows Sculpture Trail
As part of our Collection Connects project, funded by Arts Council England, local artist Lee Mason has been commissioned by us to create a new temporary sculpture for the Thorpe Meadows Sculpture Trail, working with Year 9 students from Nene Park Academy school.
Artist Lee is doing two full day workshops during September with the students to develop and create the new sculpture in response to the existing Sculpture Collection and their ideas. Lee will bring his professional artistic practice and experience of working collaboratively, supporting them to shape and realise their own creative ideas.
The workshops will introduce the students to the existing Sculpture Collection and Lee’s artistic practice, before giving them the opportunity to explore ideas, experiment with materials such as VR and help develop a concept for the new sculpture. The finished sculpture will be a temporary piece in place at Thorpe Meadows as part of the Sculpture Trail for at least 6 months but hopefully will be there for longer (subject to weather/vandalism).
No specific theme for the sculpture has been pre-determined apart from it needing to create more opportunities for visitors to connect with our Sculpture Collection and be rooted in nature, wildlife and the surrounding environment.
More about the artist
Lee Mason is a digital artist with 20+ years experience working in local communities while also exhibiting his artwork internationally. In recent years he’s been sculpting speculative organisms and architecture by hand in VR. He represents his specimens as physical sculptures with AR-triggered animations that play through screens embedded as organs within the work. Drawing on natural forms and processes related to carnivorous plants and insects, he represents non human intelligence not as a mirror of human thought but as a genuinely alien cognition with its own logic.
