Confluence - Lavit Gallery - January 2020

The Eleanor Casts

Eleanor Coade was an extraordinary woman who was born in Exeter in 1733. She pioneered the development of a highly durable type of artificial stone called Lithodipyra or Coade Stone and ran a business so successful that her products were used by all of the most eminent Georgian architects. Famous Coade Stone pieces include the lion on Westminster Bridge and sculptures at the gates of Kensington Palace. More than 650 Coade Stone sculptures are still in existence today. At various times throughout her life Eleanor Coade took on business partners but she always remained firmly in control of her company. She never married and in later life she was a philanthropist, helping women who found themselves in difficult circumstances. Considering the enormous contribution Eleanor Coade and her Lithodipyra made to the architecture of her day, writings on this subject are sparse. Being neither pottery nor stone and being frequently mistaken for actual stone, examples of Coade stone mostly slip under the radar as they continue to last not just in Britain and Ireland, but throughout the world.

The Eleanor plaster cast series originates from an actual Coade Stone sculpture here in Cork. I gently took one soft mould from which to make a plaster cast and then took another from that and so on. The features lose a little distinction with each new cast. To me these pieces are like three-dimensional rubbings: they have picked up enough information to describe their subject but at the same time each has its own innate character. As well as having a material similarity, they are connected in other ways to the large-scale chalk drawings exhibited alongside them at The Lavit Gallery. They are sequential in nature just as the drawings are, and both also have that sense of either coming into being or slowly disappearing.