Laurence Edwards

Laurence Edwards (b. 1967, East Bergholt, Suffolk) is a British sculptor internationally recognised for large-scale bronze figures made using the lost-wax casting process. He studied sculpture at Canterbury College of Art before taking a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, where he learned bronze casting alongside Sir Antony Caro. After winning a Henry Moore Bursary, the Angeloni Prize for Bronze Casting and an Intach Travelling Scholarship, he studied traditional casting techniques in India and Nepal, an experience that influenced his treatment of form and gave him the tools to establish his own atelier and foundry. He is one of the few sculptors who casts his own work, and his practice is preoccupied by the entwining of man, nature and time: fascinated by human anatomy and the metamorphosis of form and matter that governs the lost-wax process, he retains the raw process marks that tell the story of how and why each work came to be. He set up his first foundry at Bruisyard in 1990, later founding studio communities at Butley Mills on the Suffolk marshes, and now runs his foundry and studio at Halesworth, Suffolk, where he casts his work with his foundry team. He was awarded the Royal Society of Portrait Sculpture Award in 2006 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors (FRSS) in 2012. His major and public works include the Creek Men, A Thousand Tides, Chthonic Head, the Walking Men series, Man of Stones (unveiled at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, in 2019), A Rich Seam (a Doncaster commission honouring the region's colliery workers, 2021) and the 26-foot Yoxman (2021), which stands beside the A12 in Suffolk. Represented by Messums, he has held major exhibitions at Messums West (2022) and Orange Regional Gallery, Australia (2023), and his Walking Men were presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2023.

Laurence Edwards is represented by Messums.