Peter Randall-Page

This essay was originally published with illustrations in the catalogue of the exhibition organised by the Djanogly Art Gallery: Nature of the Beast: Peter Randall- Page: New sculpture, drawings and prints, published by the Djanogly Art Gallery ISBN 1 900809 85 0.

‘How do things change? We live with the reality of changing things all the time, and all our arts and crafts depend upon our power to change one thing into another – in gardening and cooking, for example. But what is change itself? At the south-east end of Chesil Bank, on the Dorset coast, the stones can be large enough for children to clamber over and hide behind. At the Bridport end, eighteen miles to the north and west, the predominantly flint and chert pebbles are small and smooth and regular enough that you can sink down into them, as into those tanks of multi-coloured balls found in children’s indoor play centres. This process of miniaturisation and regularisation and rounding off is due to the ceaseless ruminations of the tide, rolling these stones around in its mouth, milling the big down into the small. It has been said that ‘water wants to be round’. The lumpy potatoes dumped at one end of the milling machine clearly provoke the waves’ dissatisfaction. Something, it does not quite know what, is wrong at the Portland end. On Chesil Bank it appears that, if water cannot itself be round, then the next best thing for it is to make everything else round’. Read the full essay HERE

Walnut I – VIII 2000