Biography of William Peers

I went to art school in Falmouth, Cornwall, and specialised in sculpture. No one knew how to carve – neither teachers nor students.

It was not until five years of post college wilderness had passed by that I began to learn.

It happened under the guidance of a brilliant eccentric called Michael Black, who lived in Oxford. He had sculpted the Emperor’s heads around The Sheldonian years before I met him, but now, due to old age and a car accident he needed help with his work. Michael encouraged me to start my own carving and taught me how to sculpt stone.

These early carvings were figurative; abstraction didn’t come to me until much later and it came unexpectedly. Whilst carving a figurative relief carving I started to texture the surface behind the figures to animate it. I began to realise that the background was interesting me as much as the figures, so I did a carving without them. This opened the door into the world of abstraction.

I carved green Hornton stone for many years as it was local to where I was living but the quarry ran out of good stone and I transitioned to working in marble. Once I began to use marble there was no going back and I slowly grew to understand its characteristics – its strengths and weaknesses.

Recently the relationship between positive and negative shapes has become an interest, and several larger works for the landscape have been interspersed with smaller more intimate sculptures.

I have been exploring the three dimensional version of Paul Klee’s ‘Taking a line for a walk’. Removing most of the marble from a block is transformational as the focus is not only on the marble contours but the air that surrounds them. A conversation between matter and space.