Bronze 1954 - 1966

Bronze casting dominated Chadwick's working process. These works possess a supernatural vibrancy, strikingly expressed with thin spiny rods, nodes of melted metal and rib meshes of animalistic and unworldly anatomies. Beasts, birds and humanoids, some coupled, all charged with a vital and ethereal energy.

Chadwick's devoted practice as a 'conduit', meant he worked without a preconceived idea of how each sculpture would evolve. By welding together metal rods, he created working models 'drawing' multifaceted structures and filling the voids and planes with stolit, a composite of plaster and iron filings. It created a highly textural surface surface akin to organic matter.

It was essential that every cast was faithful to the working model in attitude, texture and scale. The bronze was then painted black or patinated to replicate the tones of Stolit. Chadwick felt colour was a distraction and would only introduce a polished surface to a sculpture to emphasise shape or effect a contrast.

Each limited edition cast is taken directly from its working model and made to Chadwick's specifications at his foundry, Pangolin Editions who have worked closely with him since 1982.