About the artist
From the early 1980s, Bill Woodrow (b. 1948) was closely associated with the New British Sculpture movement, a group of object-makers that also included Edward Allington, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor and Alison Wilding.
At that time, skips, scrapheaps and the streets and pavements of London were Woodrow’s hunting grounds. He would salvage objects and take them back to his studio to be reimagined and reworked. He used these abandoned material objects in innovative ways, first deconstructing them part by part and then cutting into them and reconfiguring them into surprising new object pairings. Empty baked bean cans spawned pipes and glasses, while all kinds of animals and instruments emerged out of defunct old washing machines, twin tubs and other domestic appliances. This is well demonstrated in works such as: Twin Tub with Guitar (1981), Bucket, Mop and Starfish (1983) and Blue Bird, Black Bomb (1983). Woodrow was both a maker and a magician, transforming other people’s discarded items into the most eye-catching of sculptures — turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
A technically gifted draughtsman, Woodrow was first and foremost a sculptor who enjoyed — and still enjoys — working with his hands. He studied at Winchester School of Art and then went to London to attend St Martin’s School of Art, opting for the sculpture course in part because it also offered access to different media such as photography and film. After St Martin’s he did a postgraduate year at Chelsea School of Art. He soon became a good friend of fellow sculpture student Richard Deacon, as well as several other artists such as Roger Ackling, Richard Long, Tony Cragg and Jim Rogers. Woodrow explored conceptualist and Land Art ideas as a student, initiating a deep-seated interest in landscape and its experience and representation that continues to this day.
The cut-out sculptures of the 1980s brought Woodrow national and international success and he showed his work all over the world, with important exhibitions in the mid-1980s at the Kunsthalle Basel, at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in California and at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. He was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 1986 and represented Britain at the Biennales of Sydney (1982), Paris (1982 and 1985) and São Paulo (1983 and 1991). His work was written about by some of the most interesting art writers of the time, including Lynne Cooke, William Feaver, Michael Newman, and John Roberts. His work soon began to enter important public collections across the UK and Europe, as well as in North America and Canada — including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Oslo and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
Woodrow would often travel to the location of an exhibition and make the sculpture when there, working with what was to hand in that particular environment. This experience of travelling, finding, making, and displaying in situ was repeated in many cities, as Woodrow learned at first-hand about the economies and cultures of materials and objects across the world. This coincided with important shifts in the work he was making during the 1980s. Sometimes he incorporated larger found objects, such as cars, car doors, and car bonnets, in order to make bolder sculptural and installation-like statements. Such recalibrations also ushered in the use of raw materials such as steel, glass and bronze, turning away from smaller and more intricately reconstructed found objects. We find Woodrow moving from finding to fabricating, from cutting into pre-existent objects to constructing sculptures from scratch.
The late 1980s witness a turn away from working with found objects and welding metal to working with bronze and foundries. This was a bold and brave move by the artist, making sculpture with a material that was not only more expensive to work with, but which also carried complex cultural baggage, associated with tradition, memorialisation, and statuary, as well as with ideas of replication and durability. Woodrow played with such issues in striking works, as can be seen in sculptures such as Endeavour (1994), Sitting on History (1995) and Regardless of History, which was installed as the second Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square in London.
This material shift was accompanied by an intensification of his interest in narrative and allegory, notably in tales of renewal, reciprocation, and reward, as well as in self-portraiture and puppetry. This is best illustrated by his mixed media Beekeeper project which occupied him in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Woodrow, then in his early fifties, threw himself into this subject matter — and the poetry of honey and hives and hierarchies — with a vengeance, learning the art of bee-keeping in the process.
Recent decades have seen some striking developments. We find a return to landscape, working with twigs, thickets, maps, settlements and topographies — and an invitation to consider how sculptors deal with landscape, turning what they experience, see and feel into an art work. This landscape-turn is accompanied by a renewed interest in the animal kingdom, tribes and indigenous societies. Humans and animals are poised precariously in their habitats, as his extraordinary Revelator, Evaluator and Navigator bodies of works in bronze and laminated MDF highlight well. We can also see an increased engagement with drawing — both as work on paper and as an intrinsic part of the sculptures themselves. Woodrow approaches landscape as image and object. Cardboard and paper — oil stick and acrylic — are the chosen materials, and the resulting works are sometimes cast in bronze and painted afterwards. Two-dimensional works on paper are thus turned into three-dimensional ones that have a striking sculptural quality.
Being a hands-on maker has meant that, when not travelling, the studio has been Woodrow’s main zone of activity. He has however at the same time participated actively in the public life of art and sculpture in Britain over the last thirty years or so. He was involved in the work of the educational trust of the New Art Centre at Roche Court for many years and served as a Trustee of the Tate Galleries for five years between 1996 and 2001. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2002.
— Jon Wood, 2026
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Born 1948 near Henley, Oxfordshire, UK
Lives and works in London and Hampshire
Education
1967-68 Winchester School of Art, Winchester
1968-71 St. Martin's School of Art, London
1971-72 Chelsea School of Art, London
Honorary and Foreign Distinctions
Represented Britain at the Biennales of Sydney 1982, Paris 1982, 1985, São Paulo 1983, 1991
Finalist Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London, 1986
Winner Anne Gerber Award, Seattle Museum of Art, USA, 1988
Trustee of the Tate Galleries 1996-2001
Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts 2002
Trustee of the Imperial War Museum 2003-2011
Governor of the University of the Arts London 2003-2008
Chair of the Roche Court Educational Trust, New Art Centre, Salisbury 2011-
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Photo credits:
1. Jorge Lewinski, 1983
2. Nicholas Sinclair, 1998
3. Pauline Woodrow, 2014