summer exhibition
HanNah Peschar Sculpture Garden
surrey uk 2022
ZENITH, ASCENSION, STEALTH
The Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden
For nearly four decades, the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden has hosted contemporary sculpture within a living landscape.
Zenith (Stainless steel and oak, 236 x 100 x 31 cm)
At once a point of orientation and a cosmic metaphor, Zenith draws upon depictions of celestial bodies from ancient Mesopotamian star maps to the speculative lenses of contemporary science fiction. The sculpture references the “zenith” that unseen apex directly above the observer, where gravity loosens its grasp and imagination ascends. In stainless steel and oak, Zenith stands as a monument to the skyward gaze, echoing the god-forms, constellations, and otherworldly beings that have animated human cosmologies through millennia. A distillation of celestial drama, the work becomes both compass and altar, an invitation to inhabit the vertical axis between earth and infinite.
Ascension (Stainless steel and oak, 300 x 65 cm)
Anchored in the sacred geometries of the ladder, Ascension explores spiritual elevation as both mythic motif and lived philosophy. The sculpture evokes the iconography of Jacob’s Ladder, the seven gates of Ishtar, and the sevenfold initiations of the Mithraic path portals to the divine mapped across cultures and centuries. Recalling the vow of the bodhisattva to delay final liberation until all may ascend, this work speaks to the collective nature of awakening. Through its slender geometry and reflective surface, Ascension becomes a site of meditation: an architecture of striving, purification, and transcendence. It holds the question how might one climb while remaining rooted, rise while still returning?
Stealth (Steel and oak, 214 x 96 x 51 cm)
Stealth delves into the deep time continuum of human augmentation, exploring the entangled evolution of tools, language, and consciousness. From the ancient hand carved spear to the stealth drone, the sculpture traces a lineage of innovation that is at once physical and philosophical. The fusion of oak and steel speaks to a synthesis of ancestral materiality and contemporary design, invoking a tension between visibility and invisibility, nature and artifice. Here, the human form is extended, abstracted, and reimagined. Echoing the archetype of the Lion Man, a Paleolithic figure bridging species and symbol, Stealth becomes a quiet monument to the transhuman dream: the longing to be more than human, and perhaps, less bound by it.
Together, these works activate the landscape with an energy that is both terrestrial and transcendent, carving a speculative archaeology of who we are and who we might yet become.