Jon Isherwood
Jon Isherwood was born in Yorkshire in 1960. He studied at Leeds College of Art, at Canterbury College of Art and at Syracuse University in New York State, graduating there in 1987. Today, he lives and works in the United States.
Isherwood was a protégé of Anthony Caro, working between 1984 and 1986 as sculpture technician and from1988 to 1993 as participating artist at Caro's Triangle Artists' Workshop in Pine Plains, New York. He has worked actively in the cause of sculpture, participating in and leading numerous workshops, teaching at major schools and universities, and working as artist in residence in colleges and sculpture parks throughout America.
In the early 1990s he took to working in stone, having become dissatisfied with concrete and metal and the processes of casting, fabricating and constructing, and the industrial qualities he found to persist in his sculpture. The use of stone brought new possibilities for Isherwood as he began to explore its interior qualities of as well as the range of potential for outer forms. In getting to know his chosen medium, Isherwood made sculptures which left some areas rough as the stone came direct from the quarry; he made different sorts of incisions, sawing, cutting, adjusting his need to finish surfaces in different ways: smoothing, polishing, chiselling, colouring and introducing water to some pieces. The possibilities inherent in stone are, for him, many and varied.
In her catalogue text for an exhibition of Isherwood's new sculpture at the C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, in 1998, Sarah Tanguy writes, 'In an age of virtual evanescence, Isherwood fashions lasting, material icons. Regardless of scale, they inspire reverence, while coveying timeless monumentality akin to the stone architecture of ancient civilisations.'
