WIND
Charlotte Mayer
Height 25cm
Edition of 9. Signed and dated '96
Bronze
The monumental 2.5m high Wind was commissioned by Paribas and is on public display outside their offices in Marylebone, London.
Charlotte's family came from Prague, which she left as a child to go to England in 1939. At the age of 16 she went to Goldsmiths' College where she grasped the importance of form and structure from two particularly influential teachers, Ivor Roberts Jones and Harold Wilson Parker. She went on to the Royal College of Art where Frank Dobson urged her to "keep it simple". Her early sculpture was figurative and carved from stone. A visit to New York in 1967 led to the creation of several sculptures in welded steel, inspired by the scale and architecture of the buildings. In the 1970s a new interest in the natural world developed during family holidays on Dartmoor. First, a series of welded animals, then beautiful poised serene forms inspired by pods, leaves, shells and ammonites, with movement a significant characteristic of her work. Most of her work is cast in bronze by the Pangolin Editions Art Foundry in Gloucestershire, with which she has enjoyed a long association. Some of her work is fabricated in steel. In gardens, Charlotte's sculptures are in perfect harmony with trees, plants, water and the play of light.
Charlotte Mayer's work is represented in both corporate and institutional collections, and private collections in Europe, Japan and the USA. Public commissions include work for Banque Paribas in London, and in 2001 her large bronze sculpture, Pharus, was installed at Goodwood in Sussex by the Cass Sculpture Foundation.