Sensuality in Stone

'Sensuality in Stone' is an intimate London exhibition showing stone sculptures by four strong female artists. Having met at On Form, the biannual stone sculpture show at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, all four women learned that they shared a passion for communicating the sensuality they feel is inherent in stone.

Aly Brown is a master at producing pieces of fluid, dynamic plasticity which yet remain attached to their natural origin. ‘I love creating forms which partially emerge from the block of stone. They have life, yet they remain attached to their natural origin: almost embryonic. Looking for the inherent potential and colours in the stone, my female forms create a sensuality which appeals to both male and female collectors.' Aly Brown

Kim Francis has long been passionate about the carving process, self taught through exploring her passion and materials as diverse as wood, and snow, she discovered stone. The inherent integrity and nobility of this material remains her great love. She has a deep appreciation for creating and discovering the living forms hidden within this ancient material, always inviting touch.

Mel Fraser has been carving in stone for over thirty years, her body of work is a diverse and multifaceted, carving ethereal abstract and entrancing figurative works, each laden with profound symbolic significance. She possesses an innate ability to interpret the unique idiosyncrasies of each piece of stone carving it into diaphanous veils of rippling alabaster, or conjuring a gleaming nimbus from within the rock itself. Fraser expertly probes at limits of the physical properties of stone to the brink of destruction, examining form, space and materiality with an earnest and palpable curiosity.

According to Maribel Sanchez, sculptress and Art Professor at La Laguna University, “Ana Ruiz Agui is a XXI century sculptress. Her work appears as heir to the great organic sculptors from the prior century... Nevertheless she goes beyond these with a personal approach by focusing more on the tactile than the visual; where complexity and feminine emotion, radical or even contradictory at times, abound; where the heart, motherhood, one’s identity are delicately received and transmitted by the stone through the nuances of the dim light that slides over the surface, as the result of an interior process free of technical difficulties. The stone softens and feels warm to the touch. It allows us to project our own emotions.”