Occupation Sculptor Role Sculpture Name Heather Jansch | Notable work Driftwood horses Years active 1968–present | |
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Full Name Heather Rosemary Sewell Born 1948 Essex Education Goldsmiths, University of London Artwork Two Young Lads, Nightmare and daydream | ||
Heather jansch art
Heather Jansch (born Heather Rosemary Sewell) is a British sculptor notable for making life-sized sculptures of horses from driftwood. She has also used cork as a material in her creations. Jansch reported that she struggled in her youth in schools, but had a passion for drawing and horses.
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While an art student at Walthamstow College of Art in 1967 she met the musician Roy Harper. It was Harper who introduced her to the guitarist Bert Jansch, who she later married.
She bought a smaller hill farm, breeding Welsh cobs and specializing in painting traditional equestrian portraits until starting to sculpt. She later moved to south Devon.
By 1986 she was exhibiting sculpture regularly with Courcoux and Courcoux, a leading provincial contemporary gallery then based in Salisbury who took her work to the London Contemporary Art Fair where it received very favourable reviews.
Her life-size driftwood horses became her hall mark and in 1999 were featured in the Shape of the Century 100 years of Sculpture in Britain at Salisbury Cathedral.
The exhibition was then taken to London’s Canary Wharf as part of the millennium celebrations in 2000 where her horses caught the attention of Tim Smit KBE founder of the Eden Project and she was invited to become one of their resident artists. Her horse was voted the most popular art work there and has since become widely known as The Eden Horse.
By 2001 she was casting works in bronze and had bought a small converted Coach House in fourteen acres of steep woodland with two acres of water-meadow and a stream where she began to explore site specific sculpture and over the next decade created a sculpture garden which in 2008 was included in The National Gardens Scheme's Yellow Book. The house was extended to include a gallery.
In 2009 she set up Olchard Press. She published Heather Jansch's Diary.
A reviewer in Britain's Daily Mail commented regarding her driftwood horses:
Her sculptures can cost up to £55,000 each and take three years to produce.