Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens has been the proud home of Philip Rae-Scott’s Crypto-Synthesis over the past year. Now it will continue its journey onward and will be leaving the gardens early this month.
The large-scale sculpture is sited between Richard Long’s Tremenheere Line and James Turrell’s Skyspace, standing out wonderfully against Mounts Bay and our tropical and subtropical planting acting as a perfect backdrop. It has wowed visitors of the gardens with it’s outstanding height of 7.5 metres, and its intriguing combination of flat and corrugated edges to which Philip explains, ‘to marry them together nicely was quite a challenge’.
Philip Rae-Scott is a sculptor who predominately works in metal, attracted by its strength, versatility, and the possibility of creating illusive, apparently gravity defying sculptures otherwise unachievable in other materials. He takes inspiration from the making process itself, manmade structures, machinery and the natural world. Exploring concepts of site, Philip creates monumental sculptures of a suitable scale that neither impose nor detract, but rather compliment their surroundings.
“Predominantly a formalist, I meticulously create imaginative sculptures that are considered and intelligent; forms which tenuously balance coherency and chaos.” – Philip Rae-Scott
Philip believes that humans instinctively view objects in relation to their own scale. He often produces sculptures taller than human height as “It is part of our primal survival instincts to treat an object larger than ourselves with respect and even trepidation.”
“I embarked on a self-invented cryptic puzzle, driven to breathe dynamism and life into six deceptively simple cubes – forming one united whole combined. The result was Crypto-Synthesis. The meaning is for you to decipher for I am too involved.”
Philip created this magnificent sculpture in his 2000sq ft studio in Dorset, also the birthplace of his other masterpieces that now exist within private collections in Barcelona, Geneva and England.
An inspiring film documenting the making of Crypto-Synthesis from start to finish has been created by Tom Wade. You can watch this film ‘The Making of Crypto-Synthesis. Abstract Sculpture by Philip Rae-Scott’ on YouTube here.
If you’d like to visit Crypto-Synthesis at Tremenheere before it leaves, the gardens are open daily, 10:30 – 5:30.