William Turnbull

Description

The gate form is of great interest to William Turnbull, and he had made two other gates in the early 1960s in stone, bronze and wood. When he made this piece some ten years later, he was thinking about the way that the gate squeezes space. The passage through the gate also held great significance. In Japan and India, for example, you pass through temple gates from the outer bustle of everyday life into another type of space which might be calm, quiet, enclosed or very special. For Turnbull the gate can also be the sculptural equivalent to the window for a painter. 'When you are looking through a window you are seeing a very extensive, infinite space viewed through a very limited compressed space, and it was this particular quality that interested me about doing gates.'

Turnbull chose stainless steel for this particular gate as he was at the time experimenting with the material in other work which was to be shown outside. He enjoyed its reflective qualities, and has emphasised them by his treatment of the surface which he finished with a grinder so that it caught the light in different ways. At this time he was very involved with the effect of light on sculpture and had made a number of works in transparent perspex and some open wood structures which were concerned with how light reflected from or filtered through them. At different times of day or in sunlight or cloud cover, Gate can be almost white or uniformly grey.

Gate 1972 forms an entrance to the theatre at Hat Hill Copse, and frames the curving rows of seats and a portion of the stage. It also frames the fields beyond, thus capturing both a specific and an infinite space.