Painted Wood Sculptures

Poem called “Pear Tree” by Dr Giles Hansen Sutherland

“Where far off, war and slaughter
Touched, but did not touch, the
Silent growth…

As a body bears its scars and age,
So this friend
Who filled window, view, memory
Saw his body cut and nailed

And now, too old, was cut,
Felled, milled
Is now another life
Where now, another, stronger
grows.”

The tree was felled in 1990 and fragments lay in the garden until Hansen transformed one of these into the sculpture “The Glorious and the Grotesque”, more than two decades later. The form of the wood was unaltered but the surface was transformed by the application of paint.

Works such as ‘Madonna’, ‘Headways’ and ‘Asger Jorn and Bud’ continue Hansen’s ongoing dialogue with Picasso, and the Surrealists, who often used found objects in their work, imaginatively recontextualing and re-purposing them, to give extended new meanings.