BESTIARY II

Graham Gingles

Bestiary II

Mixed media wall sculpture, wood and glass box construction

H 58 cm x W 34 cm x D 18 cm / H 22.83 in x W 13.39 in x D 7.09 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Graham Gingles (b. 1943, Larne, Co. Antrim) studied painting and silversmithing at the Belfast College of Art before continuing his training at Hornsey College of Art and the British School at Rome, where he held an Arts Council of Northern Ireland scholarship. Since 1969, he has built intimate, wall-hung boxed constructions almost entirely by hand, working without preparatory drawings and led by an intuitive, deeply personal process rooted in memory. His work is held in major public collections, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum, and he was appointed an Academician of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1986.

Bestiary II draws on the old tradition of the illustrated bestiary, medieval compendiums of real and imagined creatures, each loaded with moral or symbolic meaning beyond its animal form. In Gingles’ hands, that tradition becomes something more private: a second instalment in a numbered series populated by creatures that function, as in the rest of his practice, as coded stand-ins for memories and associations he alone fully understands. Housed within his characteristic architecture of stained wood and glass, muted in colour and quietly theatrical, the piece asks to be read less as a catalogue of animals than as a private mythology, one small, contained world among the many he has built over five decades.

To collect Bestiary II is to acquire a piece from a practice built entirely by one pair of hands, months or years in the making, from an artist whose boxed constructions have earned him a place in the same institutional company as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Ulster Museum. It is a work that repays close, patient looking, as most of what it holds is deliberately left for the viewer to decode.