Overview

Tony Plant’s childhood footprint is set deep into the cliffs and coves of his native Cornwall. Later, at Chelsea Art school, Plant was fortunate to have outstanding tutors -Roger Ackling, Trevor Sutton and Helen Chadwick who's post modernist art celebrated the transience of life: with her famous ‘Piss Flowers 1991-2’ she made casts of her own piss drawings in the snow. Chadwick’s snow and Plant’s sand - using nature as their muse and canvas, just as the aboriginal rock artists did 35,000 years ago. 

Now, away from modern art education and into the world - we see one man and a rake, a romantic landsman, transferring journeys and movements, across canvass and into the sand with the mindfulness of a Zen monk attending to his gravel garden, or the Medieval farmer hand ploughing a field of perfectly aligned furrows.

 

Tony Plant dances around the tide, playing a game with nature’s light and nature’s scale, filming the transformation with his drone at different times of night and day - we are reminded that Monet did something close with his series of thirty ‘Haystacks 1890-91.’ The beauty of Plant’s whole beach drawings is that they never overwhelm the landscape, instead they nestle into the margins between rock, sand and sea - ornamental tracery on a monumental scale gifting the viewer an unexpected poetic experience.

Works
Installation shots