Jake Harvey presents his first solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. Harvey creates sculptures imbued with a sense of stillness and a sophisticated Zen-like simplicity. He carves granite, basalt, marble and limestone, often placing the simple abstract forms directly on the wall or floor, or sometimes on shaped bases which can be set indoors or outside within a landscape. After studying sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art (1966–72), Harvey went on to become the Head of School of Sculpture for eleven years. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Sculpture and lives and works in Maxton in the Scottish Borders. Increasingly intrigued by the relationship of man to the earth and enthralled by the shaping of earth by man and vice versa, his sculptures retain the indexical mark of the maker and often subtly imply an indeterminate use or function.
‘My creative stimulus comes from many sources but frequently evolves from drawing things seen and imagined, from lived encounters with the landscape and, in the reductive process of carving, from embracing the tangential ways of making that evolve. The title of this exhibition of sculptures carved in basalt, granite, marble and porphyry relates to a material and a way of working it. In a broader context it links to my aim to create simple sculptural forms; works of distilled essence that invite deliberation from the viewer; sculptures made by a process of paring down and refining in terms of both form and concept.’ – Jake Harvey
