Music Sculpture Exhibition 21 June - 23 August 2025

Blog by Glenda Abramson

It is appropriate that during this season of summer concerts at the Turrill garden, the latest exhibition should be all about music. Performers and audiences at these concerts are surrounded by wonderful sculptures relating to music making of all kinds. This exhibition demonstrates the ingenuity of rendering complex objects like musical instrument, composers and performers, and even abstractions like musical signs, in various media. These pieces are both beautiful and quite humorous in their unlikely materials, such as a guitar and a harp carved out of breeze block by Bronwyn Sibley. They both have actual strings, and one can imagine a gentle garden breeze luring a sound from them.

            Presiding over them all is Isabel Knowland’s a limestone bust of frowning Beethoven, the only composer in the show.  

We are hoping he'll cheer up in the leafy setting!

The art of music is represented by a bass clef with its two dots beautifully rendered in breeze block by Bronwen Sibley and her large treble clef which looks as if it is made with a single rolled out length of clay but in fact it is carved.

For jazz lovers there is an old jazz player out of wrapped wire by Cherry Jacquet and two bass players, one in cutout brass by Cherry Jacquet and the other by Isabel Knowland in limestone. For those who are classically inclined there is Cherry’s  wonderful bronze cutout of a violinist.

            The music is not only represented by human artists. There is an entire choir of songbirds in aluminium, copper and, most ingeniously, in recycled cutlery, spoons, forks and strainers, to name a few. Edward Robert Hill has marvellously re-formed and reassembled these items to become a plethora of birds --tits and a wren -- perched on crooks and bars.

            In the warm sunlight, in the lush garden, these sculptures create a perfectly harmonious melding of two great forms of art.