Ken Smith

The Enigmatic Curve

I wrote this for Ken’s 2019 exhibition at Messum’s, Cork Street

 There is something both enigmatic and beautiful in the way a well-placed line, a brightly polished curve or a smooth hole can transform a piece of stone. Humans have been doing it for tens of thousands of years – shaping and cutting stone, first for tools, later simply into forms that pleased the eye and graced the hand. We were doing it at the time of Stonehenge – creating beautiful lithic objects purely for the joy of the worked surface, the shape, the colour, the weight. And yet there was also always something more to the creation and apprehension of such ancient objects: they transcended the mere essence of being stone, through the process of carving becoming something sublime and mysterious – sacred, even. And though the skill of making them was no doubt always an elusive and increasingly specialist skill, the joy of appreciating them was something that was open to anyone. Nothing, really, has changed. It is still a shared relationship, between the object, its creator and the spectator.

Ken Smith partakes directly in this age-old tradition. Each of his sculptures – whether in polyphant, alabaster, soapstone, wood or bronze – is something unique, born from his love of the material and his desire to impregnate it with meaning, a message, or the symbolism of a memory. Born in Manchester in 1944, Smith grew up in Essex and left school at fifteen. He worked for a number of years in a variety of manual jobs – a labourer on a building site, a factory worker, before starting an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. But as much as loved working with his hands, he knew this was not to be his future. He was seeking a direction, a purpose in life.

Anyone can pick up a pencil and draw. All of us have done it at some time, even if only as children. Far fewer of us, however, have ever carved anything into stone. It can be a deeply meditative, mindful experience, and it can clearly have a spiritual element to it, too. It is no surprise, therefore, to discover that in his late teens Smith thought he might have a calling for the church. He went to live in a Franciscan priory, and though he never became a friar or a priest it was the beginning of a long process of self-discovery, a spiritual journey that he is still pursuing.

 One would think that to be done well, sculpting needs thousands of hours of patient practice, the honing of hand and eye, combined with the inner vision of how to create from a shapeless mass a thing of intricate and enduring beauty. Yet Smith acquired a skill in the medium precociously young. From the friary he went daily to Yeovil Technical College, and there, aged eighteen, he was given a piece of polyphant to carve. He’d had no previous sense that he might possess an aptitude for sculpture, but almost immediately he discovered he had a natural skill. It was only six years later, whilst still a student at Walthamstow College of Art, that he submitted two of his earliest pieces to the Royal Academy’s 1968 Summer Exhibition. ‘I didn’t really know what went on at the Royal Academy,’ he confesses, ‘but then again you could sell it and make money. I was only getting a hundred pound a year grant … I sold both of them.

‘I was a little upstart, really,’ he adds, with a laugh. ‘Why would I want to exhibit at the RA before I’d been to art school? Well the reason was because I’d taught myself art before I went to art school. As simple as that!’

In 1971 he sent photographs of his work to Henry Moore, who responded positively. He advised Smith to go to the Slade School of Art in London, and with Moore’s support he was offered a place – but Smith, who had still not done a proper foundation course, declined. ‘Probably the best decision I made was not accepting the place at the Slade,’ he now admits, ‘because it meant I could develop on my own and get my own handwriting.’

Instead he went to Bristol School of Art, focusing on engraving and sculpture. When the eminent Austrian sculptor Willi Soukop visited from the Royal Academy Schools he felt that Smith had already found his own signature. So he advised him to finish his studies and focus on his work – and for the next forty years that is exactly what Ken Smith has done. Until his early retirement in 1999 he supported himself and his family as a social worker specializing in child protection and family services, engraving and sculpting in his spare time. The concern and compassion for others reflected in that other career imbued his artistic work. The early piece in bronze, Suppression, revealed his concern for political prisoners during the Cold War, and he admits a deep concern for the underdog, the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the marginalized and those – such as children – who struggle without a voice. 

We frequently encounter in his work figures clasping, embracing, supporting, loving, helping one another. Tenderness suffuses his sculpture, though other pieces, such as The Big Fight, reflect his attempts to comprehend and come to terms with many of the difficult, challenging passages in his own life story.

Art, however, always came second place to family – his wife and two sons, and now his grandchildren. ‘Art has always been number two in my life, and the family number one,’ he explains. ‘The family is always the most important thing.’ Then he laughs. ‘I wouldn’t give up the family for Art, would I?’ Yet his work clearly reflects the deep importance of the family relationship to him. In works such as The Bird and the Guitarist, Vulnerability, Mother and Child or The Miner we witness his love and concern for others.

 The fact the Smith does not make preparatory drawings adds to the sense that here is an artist intimately and innately connected to his materials. To draw before making is a relatively recent phenomenon in the crafting of stone. Smith approaches his material directly; there is no previous intercession of a two dimensional idea onto a three dimensional form. ‘They evolve as I carve them,’ he tells me. He embraces many aspects in the history of sculpture: there are elements of Classicism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Primitivism and Pre-Columbian art to be seen in his work. Yet each piece is highly personal and individual. There is something achingly beautiful about them. All are so expertly and sensitively carved – all are created with love.