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LEWES SHAPES UP

Richard Ingleby
Friday 22 August 1997 23:02 BST
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"A sculpture is like a person" said Henry Moore "and you must treat it like one. You must put it in its best environment, like a person, if you wish to see it at its best." Which, for Moore meant in the open air, with trees and water and above all with sunlight.

Since Moore's death in 1987 there has been a steady rise in the number of venues for viewing sculpture outdoors, including the mighty sculpture parks at West Bretton in Yorkshire and Goodwood in Sussex, but Moore would have been equally cheered by the growing trend for smaller, temporary exhibitions - the latest of which opened yesterday in the town of Lewes in East Sussex.

For the next two months, the work of 15 sculptors, chosen from open submission, can be seen scattered throughout the town from the grounds of the old Star Brewery to the ruins of Lewes's 11th-century Clunaic Priory. Look out for Walter Bailey's Ebb Tide, carved from the wood of fallen trees and sited beside the River Ouse; Tim Harrison's Recumbent Stones in Grange Gardens, echoing the forms of the downs that surround the town; and Stephen Gregory's Sentinel (right) and his bronze Paparazzi; a group of Giacometti- like cameras on legs in the grounds of Lewes House.

Gregory's is not the first sculpture to grace the house's gardens. Earlier this century it was home to the collector Edward Warren, the man who commissioned Rodin to create his erotic masterpiece, The Kiss. Warren tried to give the sculpture to the town, but the subject was deemed unsuitable for public display and it ended up by being sold to London's Tate Gallery. Such civic philistinism is happily a thing of the past and this year's trail is billed by the organisers as "the first step in establishing Lewes as a town of sculpture". Good luck to them.

Lewes Sculpture Trail, throughout the town to 31 Oct. Info: 01273 674692

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