Western Morning News (Saturday)
Ladies of Lockdown are haunting but with hope
Frank Ruhrmund says Tom Leaper’s bronze heads celebrate the strength of women
Born and bred in Newlyn, member of a well-known family of studio potters, although it could be said that Tom Leaper cut his teeth on clay, he was to carve metal, bronze and steel, rather than clay in his future career as a sculptor.
Known in particular for his splendid memorial to fishermen lost at sea, which was inaugurated in Newlyn by the Princess Royal in 2007, involvement in the local community has always been of importance to him, and he has worked closely with local charities and organisations throughout the years in various ways while promoting Cornwall’s culture and landscape in all that he creates.
Talking about his exhibition Ladies of Lockdown, being held in the Studio Gallery of the Penwith Gallery, he acknowledges the struggles faced by us all at these difficult times, and says how at the start of lockdown he went to his studio with no fixed ideas of what he was about to do, only an urge to start working to try and make sense of the strange situation.
The initial steps he took towards this, as he says, involved toying with bronze sheet metal, “building free form shapes and trusting in the creative process.”
As it happened, these unstructured shapes developed into a series of small bronze heads, while at the same time he became aware of the alarming media reports of the increase in cases of domestic violence. With these troubling reports on his mind, sculptures began to evolve... “The bronze heads finally made sense
to me, they had a purpose. I autoCAD-mapped the heads and enlarged them using laser cutting technology, reassessing figures into larger versions. The Ladies of Lockdown are finished in a black patina with a bright gleam of exposed bronze around their edges and mounted on Portland stone Jesmonite plinths.
“They celebrate the differences and strengths of individual women, who are at once beautiful, haunted and pained, yet hopeful. These abstract forms invite you to engage, their eyes drawing you in.”
Tom Leaper hopes they will encourage those who have suffered during this dark time to recognise their inner previous selves and find strength.
He adds: “These works represent a time when the number of women seeking refuge rose by 85%. Now is the time when we need to look after each other, a time to keep each other safe.” His vision for this show acknowledges a world that will carry on, but not as it once was. We can but hope that it will be a better one. These
Ladies of Lockdown, from Cleopatra to Nevertiti, should go a long way towards ensuring that it will be. They remind one that during the first three months of lockdown more than 40,000 calls and contacts were made to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, and are typical of Tom Leaper’s concern and generosity that he is donating a proportion of the exhibition’s revenue to Women’s Aid.
Not to be missed, as striking as it is soul-searching, admission is free, and Ladies of Lockdown can be seen in the Studio Gallery within the Penwith Gallery, Back Road West, St Ives, until October 31.