The Artwork

#EnwroughtLight

Unveiled by poet and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on 6th September 2022, just yards from Yeats’s boyhood London home at the ‘gateway’ to the world’s-first garden suburb with its beautifully conserved Arts & Crafts environment, the dazzling Yeats-inspired sculpture, #EnwroughtLight, by artist (and youngest Royal Academician), Conrad Shawcross RA envisions Yeats’s lines (set in silver in a Purbeck Stone plinth):
            Enwrought with golden and silver light,
            The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
            Of night and light and the half light
The words are from Yeats’s He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, partly inspired by the poet’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne whom he first met here in Bedford Park, partly by his dream, as an aspiring artist, of creating works of great beauty, but also by his sister Lily’s Arts-&-Crafts tapestry-work for Wm. Morris nearby, and by Bedford Park’s underlying ethos of bringing aesthetics into the everyday as part of a work/life/art “balance”.

For many, Shawcross’s spiralling gyre will invoke flocks of birds in flight (Yeats’s poetry is rich with avian instances from rooks and white sea-birds to swans, and nightingales of gold enamelling in Byzantium). For others it will echo the foliage of Bedford Park’s leafy, wooded avenues (its escape from city to pastoral), or Yeats’s sacred Celtic hazel woods, or the golden leaves of his “trees in their autumn beauty” at Coole Park. For others still, perhaps, a choir of angels, angels being not simply a key element in Arts-&-Crafts symbolism, in Yeats’s poetry, and in the design — by a Bedford Park neighbour — of his 1895 poetry collection, but the dedicatees of the nearby Church of St. Michael & All Angels.

Shawcross’s vision invokes, in contemporary artwork, such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling to quote Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, and connects both with ancient Celtic gold-&-silver-work, and with the revival of gold and silver ornamentation in the richly Mediaevalist paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a number of whom shared William Morris’s aesthetic, lived in Bedford Park – John Butler Yeats’s reason for moving there – or exhibited at Grosvenor Gallery (co-director, J. Comyns Carr, brother of Dublin-born Bedford Park founder, Jonathan Carr).

Indeed the young Yeats himself painted, on his bedroom ceiling at 3 Blenheim Road (400 yds from the artwork’s planned location), a crowd of stars, a map of the constellations, and over the years filled his poems with moon and stars, light and flame, mirrors and reflections.

The vertically-rising form invites the viewer, the passerby, to look upwards, as art and poetry ask us to ‘aspire’: much as Yeats, in one early Bedford Park poem bade his soul rise upward, just as he rose above, in his famous Lake Isle of Innisfree, London’s traffic-laden Victorian roadways and grey pavements. Yeats was a passionate believer in looking up with the lidless eye that loves the sun, in looking to clouds and star-laden skies, to flights of swans, to the even higher-flying eagle, in looking towards a cold and rook-delighting heaven.

Shawcross’s upwardly-spiralling flourish not only echoes Yeats’s archetypal towers and winding stairs, and his exploration of historical cycles in terms of spiralling gyres, but visually represents the upsurging of Yeats’s artistic genius at the heart of Bedford Park’s progressive, aspirational and aesthetic community, while invoking the very spirit of Bedford Park rising above the quotidian and spreading its communitarian concepts to a wider world.

GK Chesterton would later maintain Bedford Park had effectively conquered the world &, viewed with hindsight, this first-garden-suburb’s ‘radical’ 19th-century ideas (traditional crafts, environmental awareness, healthier housing, open spaces, egalitarianism, shared communal venues, creative networks, vegetarianism, gender equality, abolitionism, anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism, exploration of world religions and a revitalised search for a spiritual dimension) all became increasingly dominant themes in late-20th- and early-21st-century living.

Shawcross’s own unique artistic development (traced in the recent critical exploration, Psychogeometries) with its physics/metaphysics approach and its distinctive interests in both process, materials and craftsmanship on the one hand, and in fusing scientific and artistic sources of inspiration on the other – sources from literature, mathematics, choreography, mechanics, visual art and musical intervals/harmonics – approaches Yeats’s ideas of perfection in ‘Unity of Being’: Yeats himself, as a young resident of Bedford Park and pupil at nearby Godolphin School was, ironically, more successful in scientific subjects than he was in Latin and English.

It was appropriate, therefore, that we should celebrate the young Yeats as an innovative 19th/20th-century London-based arts practitioner interacting across all the arts and particularly committed to the arts in the public sphere, by engaging with our leading contemporary London sculptor (and the youngest Royal Academician), an artist whose work has already re-defined public art in the capital and around the world, from artworks in country estates, museums and stately homes to public parks and communal spaces including recently, the Royal Academy courtyard’s Dappled Light of the Sun, Greenwich Peninsula’s highly-visible London-gateway Optic Cloak (enveloping artistically a significant eco-friendly low-energy heat and light source for 15,000 homes, a truly Bedford-Park-ish concept rebooted) and the iconic Paradigm, merging art and science outside the Crick Institute!

Artwork Location

The artwork is located at the ‘gateway’ to Bedford Park where it is the focal point for our Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone poetry-places visitor experience and —

• visible from the roadways and the the pavements gray the young poet walked to school (and later to nearby homes of literary friends including actor Florence Farr, poet John Todhunter, poet/editor WE Henley, author, political activist and Arts & Crafts exponent Wm Morris, and many more!)
• close to St. Michael & All Angels Church where the family worshipped (Yeats’s grandfather and great-grandfather were both Anglican clergymen), a cultural and community focal point
• en route from Turnham Green District Line Station which the Yeatses used to travel in and out of central London for poetry, art, theatre, discussions and debates (and visible from Piccadilly and District Line Tube trains)
• within a short distance of No.8 Woodstock Road where the family lived from 1879
• en route to No.3 Blenheim Rd where they lived from 1888, where Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree and where the Irish Literary Society was founded (still a major literary organisation in London’s cultural life)
• within sight of the former Bedford Park Club building on The Avenue (now reborn as the London Buddhist Vihara), where Yeats attended lectures on Eastern religions, where Yeats’s father debated the day’s issues with Bedford Park neighbours, and where local amateur dramatics inspired Yeats’s own symbolist drama, leading to the creation of the world-renowned Abbey Theatre, Symbolist drama and to a Celtic cultural revival.
• close to Bedford Park’s Arts & Crafts pub, The Tabard, named for the inn in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and to the former Bedford Park Community Stores and Chiswick School of Art attended by WB’s brother Jack and sisters Elizabeth and Susan; the Art School’s location now houses performing arts school, ArtsEd
• facing Acton Green, the local ‘village green’ where the Yeatses enjoyed fairs and circuses (inspiring WB’s poems and Jack B’s paintings) and from where John Butler Yeats’s fellow painters painted views of this unusual garden suburb
• and twenty minutes’ walk from the Thames and Chiswick Eyot, the island that inspired Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Information sign next to #EnwroughtLight, designed by Belinda Ashton as a donation to the project. (QR code above isn’t the code that launches the smartphone trail, which is only available on the actual signage in Bedford Park)

Your support

Thanks to an overwhelming public response we raised almost £200K covering initial infrastructure, professional costs, surveys, and planning application, the artwork itself including groundwork, foundations, plinth/base and engraving, delivery and installation, the creation of schools' Yeats/Bedford-Park workbooks, public lectures, an unveiling event and reception for guests and community groups, a promotional video and the development of our Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone #visitorexperience.

Your donation now will pay for ongoing development at the artwork site (security, lighting and CCTV), help cover some three years' increased costs since we set our crowdfund targets in 2020, and help us celebrate Yeats's Nobel Centenary Year with our range of 2023 events, as well as both spreading the word worldwide about London's latest literary landmark/visitor-experience, and furthering our work with schools and community groups!

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Supporters

Thanks to all our many backers who include: the George Frampton Fund, Dukes Education, Embassy of Ireland (London), Embassy of Ireland (Washington), London Borough of Hounslow, London Borough of Ealing, The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation (The Poetry Hour), Bedford Park Society, Bedford Park Festival, Chiswick Book Festival, Victoria Miro Gallery, Irish Literary Society, Saint Michael and All Angels Church (Bedford Park), London Buddhist Vihara, Chiswick Pier Trust, Lab 99 Web Design, The Post Room Café, Savills (Estate Agents), Theatre at the Tabard, Horton and Garton (Estate Agents), The Tabard, Innisfree Housing Association, WB Yeats Society of New York, WB Yeats Society of Savannah GA, Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet, Rowan Williams, Bob Geldof, Marie Heaney, Jeremy Vine, Carmen Callil, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Polly Devlin, Tom Paulin, Roy Foster, Joan McBreen, Edna and Michael Longley, Fergal Keane, Patrick Corcoran, Miles Parker, Tom Sleigh, Anthony Byrne, Frances O'Leary, Kate McAlister, Kevin McNally, Phyllis Logan, Shevaun Wilder, Ciarán Hinds, Martin and Joyce Enright, Marina Warner, Joseph Hassett, Ron Schuchard, Nessa O'Mahony, Belinda Ashton, plus countless poets, actors, academics, architects, Yeats fanatics, and lovers of all the arts, and literally hundreds of local Bedford Park residents and others local and international, all listed on our two crowdfund websites:

• Celebrate poet WB Yeats in Bedford Park
• Discover Bedford Park with poet WB Yeats