This exquisite wall piece by highly regarded Royal Academician Nigel Hall was created for the exhibition Sterling Stuff which invited artists to cast in sterling silver at a scale no bigger than 15cm. Relating to a much larger wall work of the same title made in wood this piece brings to mind evening horizons as well as weightlessness with the upper circular form entirely suspended away from the wall creating magnificent shadows.

Nigel Hall was born in Bristol in 1943. His grandfather worked as a stonemason and much of Hall’s sculpture is informed by his experience of observing his grandfather’s work on Gloucestershire’s churches and cathedrals. From 1960 to 1964 he studied at the West of England College of Art in Bristol before completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in 1967.

Following his graduation he was awarded the Harkness fellowship, which took him to Los Angeles and prompted informative travels to Canada and Mexico. Hall’s works of the 1960s were primarily made of polished steel or wood. Concerned with three dimensional space, his abstract sculptures are informed as much by the absence of material as the physical mass and solidity of the form itself. One’s perspective of each work subtly shifts as the light changes and the play of shadows on the surface of the object is altered. Each work thus dynamically engages with its surrounding landscape, reflecting the inspiration for the sculptures themselves, derived as they are from organic forms. Indeed Hall has stated:
‘My work has always been about place. I am fascinated by the way geometry can be discerned in landscape, and my preferred landscapes are mountains or the desert.’
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