Bernard McGuigan was born in Britain in 1956 and has been stone-carving since the age of 16. He is an associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and has exhibited at the Royal Academy. His work has been shown in many exhibitions over the years and features in a number of private and public collections both in this country and abroad.

He identifies and exploits the relative properties of hardness and softness, colour and texture, in a range of stones including French limestone, Welsh slate, Scottish sandstone and varieties of marble and alabaster. Responding to the nature of each and working directly into the stone, he has developed his own distinctive approach to the representation of the human body and of the female figure in particular.

The pieces are graceful and deceptively simple, in terms of both their carving style and of their tranquil potency. In returning to his theme and its many variations, McGuigan does not set out to ‘challenge’ us in the contemporary and confrontational sense of the word. There is no mention of ‘removing boundaries’ in his mission statement. On the contrary, in a form of homage to the way that stones have long been used to mark boundaries and places of passage, his figures appear to define the limits of individual tenderness in a harsh and competitive world. Standing between artist and spectator, they mediate the ever-present challenge of being alive.

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