| ARTISTS |
William Pye
Fire and Water by William Pye is an arresting sculpture commissioned as a centrepiece to the Vineyard’s entrance. A large slate disc forms a flowing water tray supporting seven dancing flames. At dusk, the circle is described by fibre-optic pinpricks of light.
Employing water as a sculptural material is William Pye’s speciality. His use of it in his water sculptures is as varied and flexible as the element itself, and through his work one can only wonder at the wide range of expressive possibilities this wayward material presents. Certain predictable factors give parameters to abstract compositions: water finds its own level, it becomes solid when extremely cold, it vapourises when very hot, and between these extremes, it may be directed, pumped, dripped, poured, splashed and energised. Water may be flat, still and reflective, it may ripple and babble, or roar and crash about surfaces. Its qualities may be used to evoke mood and interest unlike any other mean available to the sculptor.
William Pye has regarded water as an expressive medium since childhood. As a boy he played in the stream at his parental home in Surrey, making dams and waterfalls, and enjoying grubbing around he edges and learning to swim in the local Cuttmill Ponds. These hammer-ponds were the source of power for medieval iron workings – an echo of another material Pye brings to his work, together with bronze, stone and stainless steel. Pye now owns Cuttmill Cottage, and uses the garden as his laboratory as much as he does his London studio.
Born in London in 1938, William Pye studied at Wimbledon School of Art (1958-61) and at the Sculpture School of the Royal college of Art (1961065). His sculpture of the 1960s were abstract forms and showed his preference for the traditional materials of metal and stone. Highly polished geometrical works in stainless steel of the 1970s some of which included elements of movement, reflection and the use of lights led him logically to consider water as an essential part of his artistic expression.
‘For me, water shapes the concept, directing the form and determining the fabric of the sculpture. It is often the smallest and most timeless of means by which water can be controlled, that enchant and obsess me,’ William Pye.
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