Garden Art & Sculpture – News from Simon Hempsell at Venue 136

I’m lucky enough to have been commissioned to design and create a large sculpture for Cala Homes to be installed at the entrance to their new housing development at Kings Barton near Winchester.

The client really liked my Braganca design for its simple elegant lines so we decided to scale up the drawings for this to an overall height of 6 meters, making alterations where required for installation and a much greater thickness of material. I’m really pleased with this decision as it’s one of my favourite designs with long flowing curves that I love and named after a beautiful small town in northern Portugal where I first sketched the idea whilst on holiday.

The initial idea was to create the design using stainless steel with a brushed finish, but after viewing a number of artists’ impressions it was decided to create the piece from corten steel with a rusted surface. It was thought that this would be more in keeping with the palette of materials being used to build the houses and the surrounding woodland; a little more subtle.

With an overall height of 6 meters, the sculpture is too large to make myself so I’ve enlisted the help of local company, Littlehampton Welding, to fabricate and install the sculpture. They are a great company to work with and many of you will have seen examples of their work locally; they have created amazing sculptures to go in front of Goodwood House at the Festival of Speed and the East Beach Cafe at Littlehampton.

It’s a completely new experience for me working at this scale and being part of a team effort. I’m having to work with structural engineers, specialists in soil analysis for the foundations, the fabricators, planners and the of course the client, which is great. It’s a real learning experience.