Although the integration of sculpture in gardens is part of a long tradition dating back at least to antiquity, the sculptures themselves are often overlooked, both in the history of art and in the history of the garden. This collection of essays considers the changing relationship between sculpture and gardens over the last three centuries, focusing on four British archetypes: the Georgian landscape garden, the Victorian urban park, the outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism and the late-twentieth-century sculpture park. Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens, the book uncovers the social, political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape.

A practical and in-depth look at modelling faces in clay covering essential information from choosing your clay and modelling tools to drying your work and types of natural finishes. This is a practical and in-depth look at modelling faces in clay, using step-by-step pictures, which is ideal for anyone who wants to have a go at working in detail. As the face gives the figure life and personality, it is an important focus once the body has been created. This book examines the various aspects that make up the face in depth, and which need to be considered when modelling, such as the proportions of the head, bone structure, muscles and expressions. From the face of a child to that of an adult, and from sadness to joy, the enormous variety of faces and expressions all require a different approach and convincing details to complete the figure or bust. All these things are covered thoroughly using diagrams, step-by-step images and clear explanations in order to help you create a face for your work and to improve your modelling. The book also covers essential information such as how to get started, choosing your clay and modelling tools, drying your work and types of natural finishes such as wax.

In this collection of works by more than 25 contemporary ice artists, discover a fascinating art medium defined by its ephemeral nature. Merging creativity and engineering, today's ice artist can create incredibly complex artwork, featured here in more than 150 photos. Ice sculpting's history and impact are described by champion sculptor James Stugart, including events such as the ice festival in Harbin, China. Sculpting firm owner Justin Gordon explains the tools and techniques, and Dick Brickley, former chair of the BP World Ice Arts Championships held in Fairbanks, Alaska, relates the history of this largest international competition. As sculptor Ben Firth says, "Carving ice is a good reminder that no art lasts forever; that, in the end, art is not about creating a permanent object, but about changing people."

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY: TOUCHING NATURE

A new and revised edition of our best-selling book on Andy Goldsworthy. A completely rewritten exploration of the sculptor, updated to include recent works such as Night Path (2002) and Chalk Stones (2003) in Sussex, Three Cairns (2002) on the American East and West coasts, Stone Houses (2004) and Garden of Stones (2003) in Gotham, Passage (2005) in London, and Slate Domes (2005) in Washington, DC.

Known as a 'land', 'earth', 'nature' or 'environmental' artist, Andy Goldsworthy works with(in) nature. He uses natural materials in natural shapes and forms often set in natural contexts (but also in cities, towns, parks, sculpture parks, and many spaces created or adapted by people). FROM THE INTRODUCTION

In the 1990s, Andy Goldsworthy's art began to rise in popularity: the glossy coffee table book Stone became a bestseller (bear in mind it was then priced at $55). In 1994 Goldsworthy took over some West End galleries with a large one-man show. In 1995 he was part of an intriguing group show at the British Museum (Time Machine), creating sculptures, along with Richard Deacon, Peter Randall-Page and others, in amongst the monumental statuary of the famous Egyptian Hall. Also in 1995, Goldsworthy designed a set of Royal Mail stamps (and again in 2003). Digne in France became an increasingly important Goldsworthy location, with shows in 1995, 1997 and 2000). Prestigious commissions occurred in the US from the mid-1990s onwards. For instance: the giant Wall at Storm King Art Center in 1998; the Three Cairns on the East and West Coasts and Iowa in 2001-02; the 'stone houses' at the Metropolitan Museum in Gotham in 2004; the monument to the Holocaust (also in New York) in 2003; and the slate domes in Washington, DC in 2005. Goldsworthy continues to work in countries such as Japan, Australia, Holland, Canada, North America and France (with France and the US becoming primary centres of Goldsworthy activity), but his home ground of Dumfriesshire in Scotland remains (at) the heart of his work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes. 312pp. ISBN 9781861714138. www.crmoon.com

Large numbers of Buddhist believers regarded Buddhist statues in surprising ways in late- tenth and early eleventh century Japan. Examination of such questions of functionality contributes to a broader view of Buddhist practice at a time when Buddhism was rapidly spreading among many levels of Japanese society. This book focuses particularly on the function of the following types of images: "secret Buddhas" ("hibutsu"), which are rarely if ever displayed; Buddhas who exchange bodies with sufferers ("migawari" "butsu"); and masks of bodhisattvas used in a ritual called "mukaeko," Primary sources for these topics include collections of popular tales ("setsuwa"), poetry, ritual texts, and temple histories ("engi").

THE ART OF ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This is the most comprehensive and detailed study of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and is the only full-length exploration of Goldsworthy and his art available anywhere. The book has been completely rewritten and brought up to date for this new edition.

Andy Goldsworthy makes land or earth art out of, among other materials, stacks of rocks, or stalks tied together, or mud thrown into rivers or poppy petals wrapped around boulders. His art is a sensitive, intuitive response to nature, light, time, growth, the seasons and the earth.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes. 348pp. ISBN 9781861714106. www.crmoon.com

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON GOLDSWORTHY'S LEAFWORKS

It is the leafworks that are the most colourful of Andy Goldsworthy's sculptures. What the leaf sculptures show is how beautiful the colours of nature are: Goldsworthy presents the viewer with these subtle colours by contrasting one leaf with another. Maple patch grouped the red/ orange/ yellow of Japanese maple leaves together; Poppy leaves contrasted the red poppy leaves against the mid-green of an elderberry bush; a Stone Wood sculpture of 1992 consisted of poppy leaves wrapped around a hazel branch, the red constrasting vividly with the wet green leaves. Two sycamore leafworks of 1980 and 1981 are very simple: a leaf black from cows is placed against pale Autumn leaves; another leaf, bleached white, is set down on a bed of dark leaves. He pins together two colours of sycamore leaves (sycamore is a favourite Goldsworthy medium) in Sycamore leaf sections (1988), and hangs the line of leaves from a tree. Shot with the sun behind them, the photograph of the leaves shows them glowing green and gold, the two classic colours of poetry and alchemy. The Fall colours of course connote nostalgia, decadence, sensuality, Romanticism, time passing, the decay of the year, and so on.

REVIEW ON AMAZON

A happily received gift. It's worth the price for one who wants a scholarly while earthy (sorry, couldn't help it) approach to the work. There's a quirkiness about the writing style that is engaging and honest. I'm glad I have the book and will reread it as I purchase other books on Goldsworthy where the work is shown via great photography.

REVIEW ON AMAZON

This is a chatty informational book. It has stories of many artists that have been associated with Andy Goldsworthy in his long career as a contemporary nature sculptor. If you are looking for a personal history this is a book for you.

REVIEW ON AMAZON

I'm no expert on visual art, nor would I claim to be, but I found this to be a useful book, and the only one I've been able to find about the work of Andy Goldsworthy. The author has taken the time to round up a large amount of varied source material which makes this book well worth seeking out.

This lavishly illustrated book breaks new ground in focusing on some of the many successful professional British women sculptors active during this period. Largely unknown, the few women who have been mentioned in histories of twentieth century British sculpture have been those who adhered to the (masculine) Modernist canon. Organized by theme this book explores and illustrates an unusually large number of and stylistically varied works. The social and cultural contexts in which these women sculptors were working are investigated, revealing how, mostly male, commentators often fixated on their gender at the expense of seriously engaging with their work. A wide variety of sources are used, ranging from contemporary art historical accounts to articles in popular magazines. This book explores contemporary sculptural developments, art school training, exhibiting opportunities, and the writings of influential critics. It also reveals how important photography, film and the written word were in the creation of reputations. Alongside revealing important works and individuals, this book's originality also lies in its scope, covering diverse sculptural genres such as decorative sculpture and utilitarian objects for the home and garden; portraits and statues; architectural sculpture, war memorials and ecclesiastical work.

Ply-split braiding is a technique for making textiles by parting the plies of one cord (the "splittee") with a needle or similar tool, drawing a second cord (the "splitter") through the gap made in the first cord, and repeating the process many times over. With 176 images, including patterns, these techniques illustrate how to make baskets using plain oblique twining, a version of ply-split braiding particularly well-suited for the art of basketry. This guide to the creative process gives you the information needed for shaping the form of a basket, including the rate and location of adding and removing cords. Chapters include creating fenestrations, substituting cords, combining baskets, crossing planes, and harnessing the tension between right triangles when the hypotenuse of one aligns with the leg of another. See how these techniques are rendered in a gallery of beautiful finished work.

In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking and sometimes provocative new book, leading sculptor Antony Gormley, informed and energised by a lifetime of making, and art critic and historian Martin Gayford, explore sculpture as a transnational art form with its own compelling history. The authors' lively conversations and explorations make unexpected connections across time and media. Sculpture has been practised by every culture throughout the world and stretches back into our distant past. The first surviving shaped stones may even predate the advent of language. Evidently, the desire to carve, mould, bend, chip away, weld, suspend, balance - to transform a vast array of materials and light into new shapes and forms - runs deep in our psyche and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression. With more than 300 spectacular illustrations, Shaping the World juxtaposes a rich variety of works - from the famous Lowenmensch or Lion Man, c. 35,000 BCE to Michelangelo's luminous Pieta in Rome, the Terracotta Warriors in China to Rodin's The Kiss, Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Olafur Eliasson's extraordinary Weather Project and Kara Walker's Fons Americanus, and Tomas Saraceno's ongoing Aerocene project, as well as examples of Gormley's own work. Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford take into account materials and techniques, and consider overarching themes such as light, mortality and our changing world. Above all, they discuss their view of sculpture as a form of physical thinking capable of altering the way people feel, and they invite us to look at sculpture we encounter - and more broadly the world around us - in a completely different way.

Between the ninth and seventh centuries BC the small kingdom of Assyria in northern Iraq expanded through conquest to dominate the region from Egypt to Iran. The power of the Assyrian kings was reflected in the creation of a series of magnificent palaces in which the walls of principal rooms and courtyards were lined with huge panels of alabaster carved with images of the monarch as priest, victorious warrior and hunter. Together, the sculptures constitute some of the most impressive and eloquent witnesses of the ancient Middle East. This book serves as a superb visual introduction to what are undoubtedly some of the greatest works of art from the ancient world, showcasing a series of specially taken photographs of the British Museum's unrivalled collection of Assyrian sculptures. These stunning images capture the majesty of the Assyrian king, his magnificent court and its protecting divinities, through individual panels or extraordinary, often overlooked details, such as incised embroidery on robes, the contours of flesh and musculature, the turn of a horse's head or the order within the apparent chaos of battle. An introduction sets the sculptures in their cultural and art-historical context. A brief history of Assyria and the royal palaces is followed by an overview of their discovery, reception and understanding. These are the earliest examples of complex narrative art, and their multilayered meanings occupied entire rooms in which the raw emotion and energy of animals and humans was captured with remarkable vitality. Many of these exceptional carvings rank among the greatest achievements in the history of art.

Fiona Banner, Phyllida Barlow, Anthony Caro, Richard Deacon, Laura Ford, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Anish Kapoor, Tania Kovats, Richard Long, David Nash, Cornelia Parker, Marc Quinn, Peter Randall-Page, Eva Rothschild, Richard Wentworth, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wilson and Bill Woodrow - these are the sculptors who have helped define sculpture, and here they are in their own words. From the Sculptor's Studio is a unique collection of personal conversations with 20 seminal artists, each of whom have created iconic work, exhibited worldwide, and pushed past the boundaries of sculpting in their own way. From the Sculptor's Studio contains 165 colour images of the artists' work, as well as portraits of each of the sculptors.

In his third book, Strauss delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of an artwork. How exactly does this happen? It's a question so basic, an act so fundamental to art-making, that it has rarely received attention. It makes an ideal topic for Strauss, a writer with an exceptional ability to animate art's philosophical dimensions in a clear, persuasive manner. During this time when craft and the direct manipulation of materials by the artist appear to be in eclipse, Strauss comes to their defense in a spirited cri de coeur.
Featuring over 35 illustrations, the book examines a wide variety of media and individual examples. It explores the works of sculptors Martin Puryear, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Donald Lipski; painters Leon Golub and Ron Gorchov; and writers Robert Duncan, Robert Kelly, Guy Davenport, John Berger, and Leo Steinberg. In addition, there are essays on Joseph Beuys's 7000 Oaks in Ireland, contemporary Haida carvers Reg Davidson and Jim Hart, Cecilia Vicuna's "memory of the fingers," and the influence of curators Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps on the staging of contemporary art exhibitions.
Known primarily for his writings on photography and politics, Strauss here focuses on the least mediated arts--painting, sculpture, and writing. His claims are supported by a series of close readings which succeed in recovering the immediacy of the hand and revitalizing contemporary art's connection to the past."

LAND ART IN THE U.S.A.

A study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the 'golden age' of land art - the 1960s - to the present day.

This book explores all of the major American land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, as well as European land artists working in North America. The book includes chapters on James Turrell and his vast volcano site Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks Robert Morris's environments and observatories Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field and Earth Room Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre. And Europeans such as: Hans Haacke's Conceptual art Richard Long and his art of walking Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures and Christo's wrapped buildings and islands.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he's been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists.

For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were 'the more compelling artists today, concerned with 'Place' or 'Site''. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith's vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith 'the agent of endlessness'. Smith's aesthetic became part of Smithson's view of art as a complete 'site', not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were 'in some way disrupted or pulverized'. He said he was looking for a 'denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty'.

Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: 'I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation'. Smithson's theory of the 'non-site' was based on 'absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence'. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the 'non-site' and 'site' are both interacting. In the 'non-site' work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. 'The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container - the room'.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714060. 328 pages.

www.crmoon.com