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Bill Woodrow RA b. 1948
Bill Woodrow lives in Hampshire and works
in the London. He studied art at Winchester
School of Art, St Martins and the Chelsea
School of Art. He has represented the UK at
Biennales in Sydney, Paris and Sao Paolo. In
1986 he was a Turner Prize finalist and in the
same year became a trustee of the Tate Gallery.
Woodrow was made a Royal Academician in
2013. His sculpture Regardless of History was
exhibited on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square in
2000. Woodrow's work is held in many national
and international collections including Tate
Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum and the
Government Art Collection.
The artist has written about Clockswarm:
"Clockswarm is one of a series of sculptures I started
making in the year 2000. The catalyst for making
them came from the very gentle and intimate
experience of having a swarm of bees covering and
hanging from my bare hand, a unique sensation of
sound and temperature.
The sculptures explore the result of a swarm of bees
alighting on and covering an inanimate object. The
enveloping swarm thus denies the original function
of the object, but in doing so investing it with a very
different and animate life.
In the case of Clockswarm there is an immediate
connection to time and sound. The measured
mechanical sound of the visible timing of human
existence is silenced and smothered by the bees,
whose behaviour is determined by the unalterable
timing of the natural seasons."
Clockswarm, 2001
Bronze
25 x 35 x 11 cm
Courtesy of the artist
www.billwoodrow.com
A beehive has sometimes been seen as a model of organic society;
how might we envisage a society created for the happiness of its members
where, according to Christianity, the community is understood as a body
with different organs each dependent on each other?
