102989 | GREAT BRITAIN. "Nature and Time" cast bronze Medal.

102989  |  GREAT BRITAIN. "Nature and Time" cast bronze Medal. Issued 1999 (74mm, 337 g, 12h). By Geoffrey Clarke and the Nautilus Fine Art Foundry for the British Art Medal Society.

 

Double trinity: stylized man standing in foreground, with stylized tree in background // Stylized man from the obverse, but set against a different landscape in the background, showing the passage of time; all set within thick border. Edge: Some filing marks as made, otherwise plain.

 

LeGrove M94; Attwood 143 & p. 16; The Medal 35, p. 135 (and also serving as the front and back cover art for the issue). As Made. Tan-brown surfaces. Fairly scarce, with a total output of just 42 pieces, and originally priced to non-members at £219 ($350 in 1999).

 

Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014) was an accomplished British sculptor and printmaker who was well known for his experimentation with materials and media. He even delved into the world of medallic art, with Attwood (in British Art Medals, 1982-2002) quoting the artist's appeal for medals, given their possibility of "instant expression, a permanence and a quality in the palm of the hand ... plasticine, a naked light, searching spontaneous marks, half-closed eyes and the magic begins." In The Medal 35, the writeup for this medal mentions that "...Nature and Time reflects on where humankind stands before and within these metaphysical concepts which constitute our existence. Nature and time are not separable, and the medal seems the ideal medium to express this, as Clarke has done. On the obverse is a stylistically depicted double trinity, one almost a mirror of the other, in which the figure in the foreground (man) becomes part of the trinity of the tree, and of total nature. On the reverse, set within a deeper rim, lightly textured, is the figure of man in the landscape, but a landscape of the passage of years. Here, man stands before 'the grandeur of past, present and future, of time itself,' as Clarke puts it. Never one to shy away from the abstract, whether in the language of sculpture or in philosophical conundrums, Geoffrey Clarke, in Nature and Time, has produced a medal for the millennium that is iconographically subtle and ideologically complex, a duality suited both to the medal and to the event."

 

Upload: 2 January 2025.

 

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