Jake Harvey: Tangents

27 Oct-25 Nov 2022

Jake Harvey, Composite Drawing, Earth Echo and Ware in situ, 2023

Overview

Jake Harvey’s stone wall reliefs, sculptures and drawings featured in this exhibition result from things initially seen and experienced by the artist. In the act of making, other possibilities emerge, and it is those tangential alternatives that Harvey is most intrigued by and openly embraces. 

Through carving the recent basalt works he has come to know that stone not only has the capacity to carry the memory of initial creation, but when worked, reveals evidence of previous makers and functions. These basalts were once street setts, kerbstones and causeway stones. They were quarried then chopped and carved to an approximate usable dimension and each stone carries the drawing, decision-making and mark of those original masons. In use, they were further shaped by the elements and by the traffic of people and animals who traversed over them for a few hundred years. They include that memory too. By creating his own interventions and markmaking Harvey adds another particular trace. 

The sculptures in Tangents span a four-year period. The earlier white marble works, such as Torc and Fold, reference an interest in archaeological artefacts, whereas the basalts are broadly related to landscape or more specifically to what lies beneath the surface of landscape, with an understanding of the earth’s geology. 

Honed for colour and for formal and spatial considerations, the carvings also reveal their initial formation and expose an inherent sense of infinity within their composition. Harvey’s simple, silent forms are distilled to an essence that invites contemplation. Principally made by carving, paring down and refining, these sculptures are honed as much by creative impulse as by concept. 

Jake Harvey has exhibited with Art First since 1994. His previous solo exhibition, titled Stone, took place ten years ago, in Art First’s Eastcastle Street space. At this time he was immersed in the STONE Project, through the Edinburgh College of Art, where he was Emeritus Professor of Sculpture. The publication Stone: A Legacy and inspiration for Art (Black Dog Publishing) reflects the international reach of his interests – his exploration of archaeological and architectural sites around the world, recording traces of man through his drawings and photography. Quarries and masons’ tools, cutting methods, how to move enormous stone sections, all feed into his reductive, universal aesthetic. 

The basalts in this exhibition have a connection with a commission he undertook for Kelso Town Square in which a vast sett – the Kelsae Stane - appears to have risen from the multitude of small setts beneath it, echoing their worn surface and shape, and inscribed on its sides with the place names written by those in the community with links to Kelso. In Tangents it is the sculptor’s hand that has detected life-lines and time-lines within the small old stone setts interpreting their abstract forms and layers through his own tactile sensibility. 

Harvey’s work is held in collections in Scottish museums including Edinburgh Museums and Galleries; Aberdeen; Kelvingrove and the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow; the Fleming Collection, and in Japan, in the Eda Garden Museum, Tokyo. 

Artists