WORK OF THE WEEK: Bill Woodrow, Celloswarm, 2002
Bill Woodrow
Celloswarm, 2002
Bronze, stone and gold leaf
211 x 95 x 96 cm
6ft 11 x 3ft 1 ⅜ x 3ft 1 ¾ in.
Edition 4 of 8 plus 4 APs
Celloswarm is one of a series of sculptures that covers familiar and inanimate objects with swarms of golden bees suggesting movement and activity. The swarm series was a response to Woodrow’s experience of a cluster of bees coating his hand at a beekeeping course in the late 1990s. Speaking about this sensation, Woodrow describes how it was 'incredibly light and there was this slight movement that you could just feel on your skin and there was this constant temperature. It was a very light, delicate touch. There was something fabulous about having this thing on your hand and that experience stuck with me.'
“The frenzied and lightweight structure of the swarm was rendered via solid, heavy bronze covered with honey-coloured gold leaf, a tension made more explicit in ‘Celloswarm’ where the symbolically temporary form of the musical instrument is juxtaposed with and held aloft by a solid lump of stone. The buzz of the swarm finds its counterpart in the cello’s resonating sounds.”
Woodrow has exhibited extensively with solo shows at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Palacio Nacional de Queluz, Oporto, Portugal; Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, at the end of 2013. He has received several honorary distinctions during his career including: representing Britain at the Biennales of Sydney in 1982, Paris in 1982 and 1985, and Sao Paulo in 1983 and 1991; he was a finalist in the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in London in 1986; in 1988 he won the Anne Gerber Award at the Seattle Museum of Art; he was a trustee of the Tate Galleries 1996-2001; in 2002 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.
His work is in public and private collections including the Government Art Collection, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal and the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Netherlands.